Your Boss is a Robot
CEOs from Silicon Valley to Beijing all flaunt big, public personalities. New AI technology might change that, perhaps for the better.
Klarna, a financial services firm based in Sweden, announced its Q1 2025 earnings report—and they did it entirely with AI.
“It’s me! Or rather, my AI avatar, here to share Klarna’s Q1 2025 highlights,” says a digital clone of Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski in a video. His voice wasn’t perfectly synced with his mouth movements, and the video had a fuzzy, overly smoothed texture that you often see from AI-generated content. But the discrepancies weren’t entirely obvious. Had Siemiatkowski not disclosed it, you might easily blame the mistakes on a bad sound editor or janky camera.
Tech bros might be tempted to take a victory lap over this, flaws aside. In-house film/production teams, lighting crews, and editors be damned—enter the new world where prompt engineering and AI-generated content tools come first. In other boardrooms, a sentiment like this is beginning to take hold: Only a week after Klarna’s earnings announcement, Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan also used an AI avatar on a company-wide call.
But I think these videos reveal something different. With AI avatars, the CEO’s personality becomes fungible; his/her capacity to stand in for and represent an entire corporation can be replaced by generative AI.
When a $50/month GPT wrapper can handle your earnings announcements and company calls, the CEO's role fundamentally shifts. The work of a CEO is managerial, but a large part of it also involves elevating their company’s brand through their public persona. It’s difficult, for instance, to imagine large companies of today without the people leading them. There is no Tesla without Elon Musk’s online crash outs on X, no Meta without Mark Zuckerberg’s appearances at the U.S. senate or on the Joe Rogan Experience, and no TikTok without Show Chew’s infamous line, “Senator, I’m Singaporean!” What happens when these quirks and personalities are replaced by AI content generation tools?
The tendency to view CEOs as stand-ins for their companies can be traced back to the early 2000s, according to Wired. Then, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston of the venture capital firm Y Combinator created a new playbook for companies that arose at the turn of the 21st century: that the corporation’s team—and the person leading it—are more important than the product.
You saw this play out in early tech moguls in Silicon Valley like Bill Gates and Sam Palmisano, who became indispensable to their companies. But no one embodied the CEO-as-the-company model quite like Steve Jobs. “Apple is much more than a company and Jobs much more than its founder and CEO,” Benjamin Zeller of The University of Chicago wrote in 2011. Back then, you never thought of Apple without thinking of Jobs’ iconography: The black and white image of him deep in thought, eyes at the camera, in a black turtleneck. His mantra, “Think Different,” was taken as gospel in the design and ideation of Apple’s products.
Many attributed Apple’s success in the early 2000s to Jobs’ leadership; it was clear that Graham and Livingston’s playbook worked. And the next crop of corporate leaders positioned themselves as inseparable from their companies. For example, Adam Neumann was so essential to WeWork, that when he left the company in 2019, the remaining team was left in complete disarray without him, eventually going bankrupt four years later. A similar story was observed in 2023: crypto trading platform FTX’s bankruptcy went hand-in-hand with the disintegration of CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s public image.
It might be tempting to see this as a phenomenon only found in Silicon Valley, or in the West. But remember that NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang has women in Taiwan begging him to sign their chests. I remember too when video sharing was still new to Facebook, Jack Ma would often appear on my feed, sharing bite-sized wisdom straight from Alibaba’s boardroom. His public persona had a distinctly East Asian flavor: tempered, but still confident; reserved but intelligible in a manner like Confucius.
Sometimes, entire subcultures crop up from a CEO’s personality. There have been lively internet forums dedicated to “proving” Zuckerberg is a lizard, WhatsApp groups (as I’ve seen) sharing Jack Ma’s Confucian-flavored prophecies, or Elon Musk fanbros who still ravage X. Regardless, the CEO’s public showmanship and the interest it generates serve a purpose, observes Angelo Young in Salon: to “maintain the interest of investors, employees, and the public as [companies try] to become established and profitable.”
The model that personality leads to value had a chokehold on large and emerging corporations over the last two decades. But the premise no longer stands when a public persona is easily replaced by prompts to an AI video generator. When AI strips personality away, what does the CEO become?
There are many things about AI that genuinely scare me. Mass unemployment, worsening labor conditions, enshittification, society becoming more stupid, to name some. Shifting the spotlight away from CEOs, however, is not one of them.
It’s ironic seeing some CEOs clap like seals at the rapid development of AI, when even in 2024, outlets like The New York Times and Harvard Business Review were already arguing that AI could replace them. With these changes looming, perhaps large corporations might decouple from big personalities, and the world of business may become a little less pretentious. Faceless blue chip companies of the 1950s-70s might be making a comeback.
The best founders and C-suite executives I’ve worked with are adamantly against indulging in corporate main character syndrome. The time to dim the CEO spotlight is now. Ultimately, it’s the work, not the persona, that should drive success. Perhaps we ought to realize that the attention we all pay to these executives is overspent.
