Silicon Valley moguls have lately complained that too many people are too negative about artificial intelligence. They’re likewise frustrated by stalled AI adoption among major corporations that aren’t seeing the lucrative efficiencies promised by Big Tech.
But if consumers and corporations are proving resistant to AI’s acceleration, it hasn’t stopped billionaire CEOs from charging ahead with their personal fantasies of what the technology can do.
On April 13, the Financial Times reported that Meta is working up a photorealistic, three-dimensional AI avatar of chief exec Mark Zuckerberg, according to several people at the company. Trained on his public comments, mannerisms, and up-to-date perspectives on corporate strategy, the bot is being designed to interact with Meta staff on Zuckerberg’s behalf. Employees would supposedly be able to hop on a video chat with the avatar, which could answer questions and offer managerial guidance and feedback.
Zuckerberg is personally involved in testing and training his animated doppelgänger, Meta employees told the Financial Times, noting that this early-stage project has become a priority amid the development of various other AI characters that Facebook and Instagram users will be able to engage with one-on-one.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment on the Zuckerbot. But such a concept is a predictable extension of what other tech leaders have already done. A year ago, Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Eric Yuan, the respective CEOs of Klarna and Zoom, both turned heads by enlisting AI doubles to deliver part of their remarks on quarterly earnings calls. The presentations hinted that company heads are thinking about what kind of routine responsibilities they can delegate to simulations of themselves.
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (formerly Square), has overseen rolling layoffs as the financial services company leans more heavily into AI. In February, he announced a workforce reduction of 40 percent—about 4,000 employees lost their jobs. Then, in an interview for the business podcast Long Strange Trip this month, he revealed his vision for how he can gradually collapse the management hierarchy thanks to the central AI that Block is now building on.
“I would say our max depth right now is probably five folks between me and anyone in the company,” Dorsey said. “I would want to get that down to two to three this year. And in the most ideal case, there is no layer, everyone in the company reports to me, and that would be all 6,000 of the company. And that feels somewhat ridiculous when you consider the old structure. But when you consider that the majority of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it’s a lot more manageable.”
On its face, Dorsey’s proposal seems radically different from outsourcing your CEO duties to a digital stand-in. Yet the idea yields a similar result for staff: instant, AI-mediated “access” to your ultimate boss, and the illusion that he is directly supervising all employees, controlling every last piece of the company. The trend suggests that even while platforms face obstacles in foisting AI features onto users, the top brass is determined to exert greater influence within their business through a kind of AI-enabled omnipresence.
Responding to a request for comment on Dorsey’s remarks, a Block spokesperson provided a link to a March 31 blog post Dorsey coauthored with Sequoia partner Roelof Botha, titled “From Hierarchy to Intelligence.” The piece lays out a case for eliminating middle management by rethinking how AI is integrated into the workflow.
“Most companies using AI today are giving everyone a copilot, which makes the existing structure work slightly better without changing it,” the pair writes. “We’re after something different: a company built as an intelligence (or mini-AGI).” Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is an as-yet-nonexistent kind of reasoning AI that matches or exceeds human capabilities.