Times have been tough in America since the start of the pandemic. A lot of jobs were lost, costs went way up, and now many employers are cutting positions in an effort to become profitable again. Employees are having to compete with machines for their paychecks.

Fortunately, I have a solution that should please almost everyone. It occurred to me that if complex manufacturing tasks can be done with the aid of Artificial Intelligence (as well as those jobs that we would have called “creative,” including writing and drawing), how about replacing CEOs with computers?

First, I asked my favorite search engine, DuckDuckGo, to tell me what a CEO does. It suggested the following (admitting that it cribbed the answer from Forbes and Investopedia):

A CEO’s duties include making major corporate decisions, managing the overall operations and resources of the company, and acting as the main point of communication between the board of directors and corporate operations. They are also responsible for setting the company’s strategic direction and ensuring that all parts of the business work together effectively.

So I asked if these duties could be performed by A.I. Apparently, I’m not even the first to wonder about this. But instead of answering outright, DDG referred me to a number of links. One of the first seemed illuminating:  “AI Can (Mostly) Outperform Human CEOs” by Hamza Mudassir, Kamal Munir, Shaz Ansari and Amal Zahra in the Harvard Business Review.

In a trial conducted during the summer of 2024, GPT-4o compared favorably with human competitors, faltering only in extraordinary circumstances like a pandemic-induced market collapse. Still, it seems like a future computerized CEO will have had a chance to learn from this kind of information. After all, we don’t stop using AI to make decisions just because a human might occasionally do better.

Are there potential savings for a corporation? When I asked DuckDuckGo about current CEO salaries, it volunteered that the rise in compensation in recent decades has been criticized as contributing to income inequality — but went on to divulge that the average at S&P 500 companies in 2023 was 15.7 million dollars.

A company called MYLOGIQ provided an estimate of median employee salary (in June 2022), $74,470. A company might have to eliminate 200 or 300 workers to match the savings equivalent to one executive.

How much longer will corporate boards be able to justify paying human CEOs, when AI tools are available at little, or no cost? Won’t the former executives be glad to have the new leisure that automation has always promised?