It's absolutely replacing their jobs, but not their positions. They use it extensively to create all the paperwork, communications, emails, translations... and they work fine for these tasks so they think it's equally useful for everything.
I believe that it's pretty close to the article thesis, just more prosaic.
And yes, the AI works great for some programming tasks, just not for everything or completely unsupervised.
It’s not a mystery… I can tell you what I do most days, and probably 80% of it is communication. An AI could do that. That communication is to learn what is going on up, down, and across the org. I mostly want to make sure we aren’t doing redundant work — though sometimes that is useful, and making sure timelines aren’t slipping. Oh, and dealing with conflicts.
The other 20% is writing: policies, SOPs, audits, grants, performance reviews, etc.
I could probably automate over half my job in n8n in a weekend… hmm… actually might try that.
I’m in a heavily-regulated sector, fully remote. If left alone, our junior exec:
- needs a digest of where chat activity is hottest. Maybe he lurks, occasionally he gets into conversations about what’s going on in another department.
- needs some warning if the Microsoft systems are under attack or strain. The Linux systems have not needed attention; the jargon is unfamiliar.
- occasionally brings up hypothetical radical changes in strategy. I think of these as multivariate tests. Maybe I reply, “Plenty of Kubenetes developers available right now” might communicate that some small team would be ahead of us on some solved problem.
I’m surprised that:
- he has no concern that competition even exists. No awareness that our competition demos at conferences; why they’d choose to spend time that way.
- no interest in the big accounts we don’t have. If it would take a big lift, what would engineering need? If it would take a small lift, what non-engineering is blocking? No interest.
- person-to-person networking is effective at all. I just can’t imagine any value in two execs meeting without hours of preparation.
I’ve seen BI tooling around each of these. I wonder if a daily “facts of our department” slide to begin each meeting, if that would replace/augment 51% of visible exec.
No, execs aren't owners, but... if an exec can deliver the same or better results with fewer employees, aren't they a better exec? And if so, aren't they worth more money?
(Yeah, I know, there's lots of instances of execs who got paid huge amounts of money and delivered abysmal results...)
Boards aren't exactly dummies either. If they can see their exec isn't necessary I think they'd make moves to eliminate the positions. But that's in a world where reality meets the hype, and I don't think we're there yet. It gets weirder to think that then anyone with access to the tools and some capital could reasonably make their own company to battle it out with the big guys, but that future is a lot hazier.
Not really, not unless you're C-suite or your org size is in the thousands. When Google's looking for a VP to run a 100 person department, they care about your experience running similarly sized orgs as much as they care about your ability to achieve business results. People make fun of empire building but it's absolutely rational on the individual level.
