A group of software engineers who say AI cost them their jobs has decided to return the favor by building an AI platform meant to replace the CEO.
Called OpenExecutive, the project is equipped to do the work of a chief executive with the aim of automating the entire C-suite.
The pitch doesn’t shy away from being blunt and ironic about it all: “Work happens around the clock. Leadership doesn’t scale with it,” the demo video released on GitHub declares. The team further bills its creation as a “senior advisor with Harvard MBA-level knowledge.”
Inside the engine room
Under the hood, OpenExecutive runs on Anthropic’s Claude models. Claude Sonnet 5 does the everyday work, with Claude Opus 5 held back for the heavier “deep reasoning” jobs. The system works by spinning up eight different AI agents, each assigned a top executive role such as chief strategy officer, chief financial officer, chief of HR, and so forth.
Together, they fuse into one “executive persona,” which is, you guessed it, the CEO role. The developers say the platform can learn from a company’s documents and remember its own recommendations and decisions, which is more than you can say for certain executives. Since the program is open-source, anyone who’s unconvinced of the setup can have a go at it themselves.
The big question, however, is: could the platform actually put CEOs out of work? Probably not. There’s a lot to running a company that a machine can’t fake, like taking accountability, though maybe that’s a bad example. But that’s rather the point the engineers are making. You could say the same about most workers, except that the workers are the ones doing nearly all the actual labor.
By arguing that AI is a tool for efficiency that ‘replaces’ expensive human labor, CEOs have set a standard. If the logic holds that human workers could be replaced by cheaper, tireless software that never calls for strikes and never asks for a raise, then by this logic, CEOs should be the first to step aside
For all you know, some executives might even like the idea. Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building his own CEO AI agent to help run Meta, plus a photorealistic AI clone of himself so he can be everywhere in the company at once.
Sources: GitHub, Wall Street Journal, The World Economic Forum, Futurism