A group of developers lost their jobs due to reasons given by their employers “Artificial Intelligence Transformation”. In response, laid-off engineers created OpenExecutive, an open source system to take over the responsibilities of CEOs and other senior executives, and potentially replace them all. The employer has not been named; the developers are positioning their system not as revenge for being fired but as a satire of the artificial intelligence hype sweeping big business.
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OpenExecutive provides users with a single AI executive, supported by a team of eight expert agents. The virtual management team includes all key executives, from chief strategist and chief operating officer to general counsel and director of communications. The system can use company documents, remember previous decisions and recommend further actions.
By default, OpenExecutive uses Anthropic’s Claude model, and the management agent routes requests to experts who appear relevant to it. The developers pitch it as an operational group chat for senior management. This project is distributed under the Apache 2.0 Permissive License. Anyone can study it, modify it, run it internally, or create commercial products based on it.
Open source allows employees to try and apply the same logic as their employers. If a company can divide software development into tasks, assign those tasks to models, and leave a few people to oversee it, it can try to do that now.
A manager’s job includes processing information, preparing plans, comparing trade-offs, and creating documents for other managers. Developers say this can all be done through AI models, making OpenExecutive both a product and a satire of AI products.
OpenExecutive is an advisor to the executive, not a legal director, as only individuals can make decisions and be responsible for their consequences. The model could recommend office closures or layoffs without repercussions for those affected, and those who use it may find the machine’s apparent neutrality quite comfortable.
The plan reveals one of the strangest paradoxes behind AI-induced layoffs. The company evaluates programmers based on whether the results meet technical specifications. People evaluate managers more on their personal qualities and decision-making abilities. Artificial intelligence won’t eliminate this difference, but it will force you to look at situations from a different perspective. If developers must prove that their work contains more than the code that AI can produce, then senior managers should prove that their value exceeds AI’s suggestions. A good salary doesn’t just allow you to schedule another performance meeting.
OpenExecutive won’t make CEOs obsolete, at least not today. The virtual director’s recommendations require knowledge analysis and review. But developers’ experiments show that rhetoric about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in the enterprise cuts both ways. Once managers decided to break down each job into tasks and evaluate them by machines, their own jobs became suitable material for the same experiment.
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