CEOs and AI

AI is arguably the most transformative and empowering technology of our lifetime. We can use AI to improve our products, broaden our goals, and achieve new heights.  

Or we can fire a bunch of people.  Right now, the industry mostly seems to be firing a bunch of people.

Some CEOs are embracing the opportunity — but for others, their best idea is to get rid of people: CEOs Have Split on AI’s Jobs Impact:

• AI changes “how we work,” says Brian Armstrong, CEO at Coinbase Global. The company on Tuesday announced it was cutting 14% of its workforce.
• “I am thinking of AI as the thing that allows our teams to do more, not the thing that replaces our teams,” says Josh Isner, president of Axon Enterprise.

I was fortunate to work at Microsoft during a period of great transition and ambition.  PCs, GUIs, networks, the internet, and mobile all swept through the industry, and the company had the vision and ambition to try to stay on top of it all.  Microsoft never quit expanding its scope, taking on developer tools, operating systems, office applications, home computing, enterprise servers, games, gaming consoles, websites, and more.  Heck, Microsoft even did multiple overlapping operating systems and multiple application suites.  Software in printers, fax machines, and photocopiers?  Sure, let’s do that.   An internet news magazine and a news network?   Sure, why not?  Software in hundreds of languages?  Absolutely.  Software encyclopedias and reference apps?  Yes, of course.  Travel booking?   Restaurant reviews?  An Online Service?  A music player?   Phones?  PCs?  Voice Assistants?  Educational software?   Videoconferencing (many times)?  Maps?   Mice?  Video cards?   Yes to all.  And there were probably hundreds more nascent ideas that had some investment but never made it out of the company.

Microsoft leadership had great ambition and encouraged us all to have ambition.  There was a belief that Moore’s Law would continue to open up vast new opportunities, and that we should not miss them. 

There are examples today of companies choosing to do more with AI:  

• Jensen Huang of Nvidia:  "I want every task that is possible to be automated with AI. I promise you, you will have work to do... Frankly, I think we're probably still about 10,000 short."
• Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase:  "We already have huge redeployment plans for our own people... we have displaced people from AI — and we offer them other jobs. They're usually well-trained and highly talented, and very good at things."
• David Solomon of Goldman Sachs:  "I think we're going to be running a much bigger enterprise... we'll wind up with more jobs 10 years from now than we have today."

But most companies are embracing the layoff path.  Even incredibly successful enterprises like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are participating in the layoff wave.

Doing more with the people you have — this is a hard path.  It requires vision, ambition, operational excellence, and a willingness to take risks.  The board and investors have to be supportive.  The company's culture must encourage risk-taking without blame.  And it helps to have an underlying business generating excess cash, as Microsoft did in the 80s and 90s and as Nvidia does today.  

Some CEOs aspire to do more, but one or more of the ingredients of culture, skill, board support, or financing are missing:

• Paul Hudson, Sanofi:  "I can't fire enough people to generate enough cost savings to discover new medicines fast enough. What I can do is weaponize the people to use AI to think bigger than they've ever thought, to discover new medicines faster."  Hudson was ousted earlier this year after some expensive pipeline failures.
• Chuck Robbins, Cisco: "I don't want to get rid of a bunch of people right now. I don't want to get rid of engineers. I just want our engineers we have today to innovate faster and be more productive. That gives us a competitive advantage."   Chuck still has his job, but he has bowed to layoff pressure and is cutting 4000 jobs.

Layoffs are easy.  But CEOs earn tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and even billions annually.  So, shouldn’t the expectation be that CEOs and companies take the hard path to retain staff and grow their business?   It doesn’t take long to come up with some ideas that all CEOs should be trying:

• shifting more people into forward-deployed customer roles to help build greater customer engagement and drive greater customer revenues. 
• working off the backlog of feature ideas and business ideas that the company hasn’t had time to chase
• giving people 20% time to explore new ideas in a bottom-up way
• reaching out to everyone in their business for ideas on how to retain everyone and grow the company.  The best ideas often come from the trenches.

As a board member, if your CEO, making tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, has no better idea about how to develop the business than “let’s fire a bunch of people,” shouldn’t you look for a new CEO who is a little more creative and ambitious?

For job seekers, it is great to work in a mission-driven organization with a culture that encourages risk-taking; hold out for that experience if you can.  It will be very hard for you to join a company and change its culture.

And for people in existing roles, you are probably adopting AI in your own work, which is great.  Given how hard the CEO job is and how many CEOs fail, don’t sit around waiting for the CEO or leadership to figure out how to grow the company with AI.  Jump in and start imagining how the company can do more customer-centric work, expand its offerings, or appeal to new markets.  Be the leader and voice in the company for doing more; don’t wait for the CEO to figure it all out.  Because most CEOs won’t figure it out on their own.