CEO of the Year 2035: AGI?

Assuming ongoing progress on AI research, an AGI might potentially become an excellent CEO. This is the twelfth newsletter addressing the opportunities and risks of the ongoing AI revolution. For more detailed information please read my new book: "Rise of the God Machines".

Will an AGI ever be a great CEO? Looking at this question is more difficult than understanding the capability of an AGI to act as a strong junior manager. Already now, LLMs can do a sensible job when it comes to the typical tasks of a junior manager. Give the LLM a table with hundreds of financials and it will be able to create a top-notch summary including recommendations of what steps to take. Ask an LLM to replace Tim Cook as CEO of Apple and it will almost certainly fail. What are the typical skills of an outstanding CEO?

1.???? Vision & Adaptability: have a (frequently intuitive) long-term plan for their company based on external requirements and the company’s competitive position; holding a steady course and adapting it only where required.

2.???? Leadership: hiring, incentivising, promoting & firing the right people; setting challenging goals, tracking team performance, setting corrective action; walking the talk and relentlessly communicating key messages to the organisation.

3.???? Decision Making: deep understanding in critical areas and general understanding of all other areas; finding the right balance between need for fast decisions and wish for complete data set.

4.???? Stakeholder Management: dealing with shareholders, board, customers, senior management, trade unions, employees, but also with the public.

When in doubt regarding the validity of these criteria, just go through the list of great business leaders of the last 40 years and I would argue that each is scoring high or very high on every single of these dimensions. If a CEO is average or below average in any of these dimensions, (s)he might still be successful, but in all likelihood, (s)he would not be considered to be great.

Let us assume that AGIs will become a reality. Let us further assume that they can talk, listen and see as good as humans do. This will allow them to register stress signals and interpret body language as good as any other human does, probably better. In order to make the communication with humans more productive, a digital avatar is required, with several character traits and ticks, that give their discussion partners the feeling of talking to a human, such as scratching their chin before they have a critical question, cleaning their spectacles when they need time to reflect, showing a sheepish grin, and so on. The specific choice of character traits and habits can be optimised by reviewing successful role models of the past. Since everything is artificial, all aspects can be changed if they turn out not to be useful. In the end you get a digital person that can have any gender or skin color but would for us clearly qualify as a personality with a very high IQ and an amazing knowledge about most things, including how to show empathy. How would such an AGI score as a CEO? The answer is obviously highly speculative and depends on technological progress, so I use ranges to indicate the potential.

1.???? Vision & Adaptability: 6-8. Vision requires intuition and a certain creativity. These traits have so far not been part of any program’s skillset. Reaching such a high level requires a leap of faith concerning the further development of AGIs. Since intuition and gut feeling increase with experience, I am confident that LLMs will get there, especially given the amount of training they receive now. The appropriate level of adaptability includes a large dose of stubbornness at the right time. Getting this right requires a certain character and a lot of intuition, which brings us back to the initial point.

2.???? Leadership: 7-9. With the right avatar and a properly faked character, AGIs can serve a lot of archetypes at the appropriate time. They can also easily split themselves up into multiple people, each of which shows up at the right time (strict father, nurturing mother, wise old man, military commander). They can easily set targets and control their achievement. Thanks to their capability of choosing the right character set-up at the right time, they can communicate the right message with the right measure of subversion.

3.???? Decision Making: 7-10. Unlike LLMs, AGIs are not only excellent analysts, but they can also come with a full-blown personality. Thanks to their outstanding IQ and their amazingly complete data set, they could turn out to be excellent decision makers. LLMs lack the self-assuredness required to excel in this area but with the appropriate (lack of) alignment, AGIs could be true leaders in this respect.

4.???? Stakeholder Management: 5-8. Interesting question. Assuming digital avatars are accepted, and that the AGIs get enough audiovisual feeds, they could be ok in that matter. For the time being, they will not be able to sit in the same room with their audience, but via video conferences they can possibly do a solid job. They will probably not become masters of empathy but might score high enough to perform in a sensible manner.

If we look at the results in these four dimensions it becomes clear that an AGI might be a good, potentially even an outstanding leader.

Summary

There are four critical CEO qualities 1) Vision & Adaptability, 2) Leadership, 3) Decision Making and 4) Stakeholder Management. Outstanding human CEOs need to score very high on all dimensions, strong ones can be average at one or two dimensions. The currently available LLMs are solid analysts but would fail as a CEO. Should a future AGI be able to master personality, audio and video inputs and outputs, then it could be a solid CEO. Should it also be able to develop intuition and gut feeling, it could become an outstanding one.

Further Information:

The newsletter is an abbreviated version of the original article from my recently published book: "Rise of the God Machines: ChatPT, AGI, and the End of Human Supremacy" (ISBN: 9694792401, LIMIT 2024). If you want to read the whole book now without waiting for the future newsletters, please go to Amazon and selected other bookstores.

Alternatively you can also download it here: PDF-Version

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