Dear Lewis, my CEO wants AI to do it all. How do I argue for humans?

Nearly all of the arguments here are easy to dismantle but I don&#x27;t feel like arguing with a half-baked Substack post, so I&#x27;m not going to.<p>Just want to highlight one element in particular that jumped out at me:<p>&quot;AI has nothing personal at stake. It doesn&#x27;t feel the pressure of missing quota or the exhilaration of exceeding it. It doesn&#x27;t have a mortgage payment riding on that commission check.&quot;<p>So the AI doesn&#x27;t manipulate power dynamics to control its employees... and that&#x27;s a bad thing? Okay. (It isn&#x27;t true anyway; AI can easily do that.)

&gt; AI has nothing personal at stake... It doesn&#x27;t have a mortgage payment riding on that commission check.<p>Glossing over the whole AI thing... Maybe we shouldn&#x27;t be structuring our systems so that the humans are one bad quarter away from financial ruin either

So, has anyone considering turning the tables and replacing the CEO with AI?<p>Seems like a more reasonable path to me; more logic and less bullshit at the core, keep human creativity.<p>The director from the Travelers series, basically.<p>Just consider the potential savings...

I think a very direct answer to this is pointing to the hot water Cursor found itself in after an AI customer support agent made stuff up.<p>- Do you want an LLM salesbot to close a deal your company isn&#x27;t actually able to fulfill?<p>- Do you think your company will use AI more intelligently and reliably than the people who made a popular LLM coding system?

&gt; &quot;The CEO was wavering until Tom found out they both owned the same obscure Italian motorcycle. Tom took him for a ride along the coast. Contract was signed the next day.&quot;<p>As a junior, I often wonder how many deals are signed in exclusive country clubs, on golf courses, and at the dining table with endlessly flowing Maotai.<p>For a successful career, is it better for one to prioritize network over skills? It seems to me that the latter can be commoditized by AI, while the former can not. Rather than learning Lisp, maybe it&#x27;s time to pick up golf. I&#x27;m only half joking.

I don&#x27;t think AI salespeople can replace human salespeople, but are deals really being closed while taking people for motorcycle rides? Who goes on motorcycle rides with vendors?

I would agree with ein0p, but maybe you can delay it by suggesting he watch DODGE and its system replacement for the US Social Security Admin Systems, and maybe the IRS Systems too.<p>It is lead by Musk and I am sure he will use AI for that. Present it as &quot;If Musk Fails, we will fail&quot;.

Leadership has been pushing AI in my company for a while. Just had a massive outage because someone asked copilot how to deal with some data and it broke prod for 2 hours. Was actively asking copilot for help during the remediation. The lost revenue was probably equivalent to 20 engineers full-time. Explain to me how AI saves more money than it costs.

As a co-founder at a company, I get more outbound sales spam than you can imagine. I just checked my spam folder and I get at least 30-50 &quot;personal&quot; sales outreaches a day.<p>So many of them are obvious AI to anyone who has used LLMs. The emails are always like &quot;Hi, I really like how &lt;general fact about company mission&gt; and how you used to &lt;old job on LinkedIn&gt;. We can 10x your business...&quot;<p>Another fun one is they say they care so much about our business that they recorded a personalized video of them exploring our website. But the video is a person gesturing at their computer screen that only shows a Cloudflare bot blocking page because their AI video generator got blocked by our site as a bot.<p>It&#x27;s so lame. It feels incredibly off-putting and dishonest that I am having my time wasted by a machine pretending to be a real person spending their time on me.<p>The problem is that this automation leads to the death of the entire sales channel. If 99% of &quot;personal&quot; emails I get are computer generated and the volume of emails keeps increasing because it&#x27;s now so easy to send them, I&#x27;m going to stop reading any emails. I feel burned.<p>This is the problem with AI sales. It can automate the current average sales process. This in turn makes the average sales process really easy, so it gets saturated by everyone and then it no longer works for anyone.<p>If anything, you should do the opposite of whatever the AI sales people are currently doing. That&#x27;s the way to make a mark.

Suggest a 48-hour trial, give everyone 2 days off and let AI try and replace everyone.<p>I think this is one of these scenarios where feeling the pain is the only way they&#x27;ll ever truly understand.

There is nothing new under the sun. There was a famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 that laid out the issue. It would have been a good image for this substack post, though I&#x27;m not sure the author would have completely appreciated the irony. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;condenaststore.com&#x2F;featured&#x2F;trust-me-mort-no-electronic-communications-donald-reilly.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;condenaststore.com&#x2F;featured&#x2F;trust-me-mort-no-electro...</a>

I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a good way to do this. The entirety of the AI industry at this point is to short-circuit any arguments against it.

Let it crash<p>My manager who has zero experience coding us now vibe coding all day.<p>Spoiler alert : it isn’t ending well<p>Production crashed, weeks debugging. Lots of wow I didn’t expect that

As I read the article, I actually wasn&#x27;t convinced that people were needed over AI <i>in this case.</i><p>Why?<p>When some people hire, they have their subordinates sit in meetings all day, doing occasional tasks, and merely feeding their enlarged egos. If all you want are subordinates to feed your ego, AI is exceptionally good at that. Plenty of people love talking to chatbots.<p>The problem is the author never really explained what the roles were. Were they customer facing sales calls? Did the CEO really believe that customers will be happy to talk to a sales robot?<p>Thus, because I believe these roles aren&#x27;t customer facing, I suspect that these roles are either feeding someones&#x27; ego by sitting in meetings all day, or otherwise non-customer-facing roles that handle aggregating information. This makes me wonder if a smaller group of people, who know how to use AI well, will outperform a larger group of people without AI.

&gt; An executive has 48 hours to convince his CEO why AI can&#x27;t replace human talent<p>&gt; The &quot;Replace or Justify&quot; Ultimatum<p>It is hard to take this kind of stuff seriously. Actual businesses that produce value do not operate in this way.<p>I feel like one of the more important lessons I picked up along my journey is that ultimatums are a <i>really</i> bad idea. Instead of creating dialogue and exploring the entire gradient of in-between goldilocks solutions, you&#x27;ve narrowed an ~infinite spectra into 2 discrete, highly adversarial&#x2F;tribal bins. This is not a good premise for a conversation around AI and how it applies to business. I don&#x27;t know of a single business venture that couldn&#x27;t extract <i>some</i> value from AI. Perverting this notion into an all or nothing narrative is so ridiculous to me.

There&#x27;s a good zen koan waiting to be written with the CEO as the novice and the domain expert as the master. Ironically I tried to use Claude to write one and only got crap.

Simple. &quot;AI, in its present incarnation, is not capable of doing it all. So let&#x27;s instead focus on where specifically we can apply it to derive some benefits.&quot;

This author actually sells his time for $275 per hour for career advice and I can tell you thats the absolute waste of both your time and money. I did the mistake and he is cargo culting PM stuff. Anyways not surprised at his take on AI

This reminds me of that peculiar wisdom: if you want a non-monogomous relationship, you&#x27;d better make that clear from the very start.

Actually I sincerely believe AI is a good candidate for the CXOs. You want your leader to be as impartial and sensible as possible.

How about they try a small scale experiment and see what happens. See if Ai sales even works before betting the farm.

How about the AI replaces the CEO too?<p>Fully automated company with no humans in the loop. That’s what’s coming.

I suggest , start with automating CEO&#x27;s job first ?

You can&#x27;t argue for humans with a person who wants to get rid of humans. Show him why it could threaten profits and&#x2F;or his fat compensation package - that will be much more effective.

Did you try asking ChatGPT?<p>Snark aside, it sounds like your CEO doesn’t trust you. CharGPT can generate a report for you showing benefits. Or you can pay McKinsey a few hundred grand (if you’re lucky).

And now, the worst of both worlds (&quot;A bear wielding a knife&quot;):<p>John has a special issue. He calls for support. Support is made of low paid personnel with no real knowledge of the product; during the call, they encouraged John by telling him that his issue is solved by - non-existent - features in the product, that the LLM aiding the &quot;human interfaces to clients&quot; matmulshitted.<p>John is rightfully upset for a number of reasons. (Happened a few weeks ago.)

Wait for it to fail in easily-predictable ways and laugh at the chaos and “OMG who could have guessed?” from your “brilliant” business leaders?<p>I’ve given up on resisting this idiocy and am just trying to stay out of the blast radius while I roast marshmallows on the ensuing fires.

This is basically cope, sorry.<p>Tell them you have an AI CEO and they have to meet the same standard. I can show you a demo :)

So a guy closes a multi million dollar sale because the client CEO happens to own the same motorcycle and they went for a ride together?<p>This sounds like an argument for turning it all over to AI to me. Both the buying and the selling.<p>Thing is, on a personal level yes, things like motorcycle rides are important. That is what life is made up of, what we live for. But a corporation should exist to provide goods and services to end users and a return to shareholders. This is an optimization problem and not a place for motorcycle rides. In theory (not arguing for or against capitalism) this optimization raises the standard of living for everyone.<p>Selling by personal connection and a motorcycle ride is really a form of cronyism or corruption. The end consumers and shareholders get shafted. This kind of nonsense is especially pronounced and explicit in less well off societies and lowers the general standard of living. So let AI do it. Oh, also give AI the manager who wanted to replace the salespeople with AI&#x27;s job. That should probably be one of the first jobs to be replaced.