But if consumers and corporations are proving resistant to the acceleration of AI, that hasn’t stopped billionaire CEOs from moving forward with their personal visions of what the technology could do.
On April 13, the Financial Times reported that Meta is working on a photorealistic, three-dimensional AI avatar of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, according to multiple people at the company. Trained by his public comments, mannerisms and latest viewpoints on corporate strategy, the bot is being designed to interact with Meta staff on Zuckerberg’s behalf. Employees will supposedly be able to video chat with an avatar, who can answer questions and provide managerial guidance and feedback.
Meta staff told the Financial Times that Zuckerberg is personally involved in the testing and training of his animated doppelganger, noting that this early-stage project has become a priority amid the development of various other AI characters that will allow Facebook and Instagram users to connect one-on-one.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment on Zuckerbot. But such a concept is a speculative extension of work already done by other technology leaders. A year ago, Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Eric Yuan, the respective CEOs of Klarna and Zoom, both attracted attention by enlisting AI doubles to deliver part of their comments on quarterly earnings calls. The presentations indicated that company leaders are thinking about what kinds of routine responsibilities they might assign themselves to emulate.
Meanwhile, Block (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey has overseen rolling layoffs as the financial services company leans more into AI. In February, he announced a 40 percent reduction in the workforce – approximately 4,000 employees lost their jobs. Then, in an interview for the Business Podcast long strange journey This month, he revealed his vision for how he can gradually dismantle the management hierarchy on which the bloc is now building, thanks to the centralized AI.
“I would say our maximum depth right now is probably five people between me and anyone else at the company,” Dorsey said. “I’d like to reduce that to two to three this year. And in the most ideal case, there are no layers, everyone in the company reports to me, and all 6,000 people in the company would. And that sounds somewhat ridiculous when you consider the old structure. But when you consider that most of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it’s much more manageable.”
At first glance, Dorsey’s proposal seems a far cry from outsourcing your CEO duties to a digital stand-in. Yet this idea yields a similar result for employees: instant, AI-mediated “access” to your ultimate boss, and the illusion that he or she is directly supervising all employees, controlling every last part of the company. The trend shows that even though platforms face hurdles in implementing AI features on users, top executives are determined to have greater influence within their business through a kind of AI-enabled ubiquity.
In response to a request for comment on Dorsey’s comments, a Bloc spokesperson provided a link to a March 31 blog post that Dorsey co-wrote with Sequoia partner Roelof Botha, titled “From Hierarchy to Intelligence.” This piece makes the case for eliminating middle management by rethinking the way AI is integrated into workflows.
“Most companies using AI today are giving everyone a co-pilot who does the job a little better without changing the existing structure,” the pair write. “We’re trying to do something different: a company built as intelligence (or mini-AGI).” Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a yet-to-exist type of reasoning AI that matches or exceeds human capabilities.
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