The Era of the AI-Led Corporation
Human organizations have historically been limited by biology. Skills, judgment, and knowledge can’t be copy-pasted. Training an expert, like a top engineer, takes years, and scaling a team requires finding rare talent in a finite pool. But what if that were no longer the case? What if a piece of code could replace the power of the human mind?
Advances in AI, like Meta’s new model Tribe, which can predict brain responses to movies, hint at a future where algorithms understand human thought on a deeper level. This could lead to content, ads, and even propaganda that are precisely engineered to influence our brains.
From Physical to Digital Labor
Historically, turning capital into labor meant a “clunky detour” through the physical world. Entrepreneurs bought physical tools and hired people to operate them. This process was slow, messy, and human. Humanity’s edge has always been social learning, but the transfer of knowledge is imperfect and slow. Elite schools may concentrate top teaching talent, but even they have limited reach.
Education today is a microcosm of this problem, facing teacher shortages and hiring bottlenecks that limit how knowledge spreads. Imagine if we could perfectly copy the pedagogical skills and expertise of a master teacher and deploy millions of them. This is the future of the AI-powered corporation.
The Rise of the Omnimega CEO
With AI, capital turns into compute, and compute turns into limitless capacity. A central AI, an “omnimega CEO,” could absorb data from millions of specialized AI clones. Every student question, every moment of confusion, every successful explanation—all of it would be taken into account. Millions of teaching AIs could spawn, experiment, and instantly share innovations. Tacit knowledge, those unspoken tricks of the trade, would be preserved and propagated perfectly.
This model scales up to the business world. While today’s CEOs only see fragmented, sanitized reports, an omnimega CEO would learn from legions of clones. One clone might optimize battery chemistry, another could simulate market shifts, and a third might negotiate with suppliers. These specialized AI agents could spawn for specific tasks and then reintegrate their discoveries, acting like neurons in a colossal brain.
The Threat of the Single Gigafirm
Fully automated firms could dwarf today’s largest corporations by coordinating millions of specialized AGI employees. But an AI firm could also reproduce its successful internal divisions and clone them into new, separate companies to pursue niche markets, which might prevent the emergence of a single universal “gigafirm.”
Corporations don’t currently clone themselves and take over all market segments because they’re made of people, who are not interchangeable or easily copied. Automation, however, would allow firms to replicate and grow at an unprecedented speed. The key check on this power is the need for an external, unbiased fitness signal: profit and loss. If a firm grows so large that its internal objectives drift away from real consumer demand, it becomes vulnerable to competitors.
The Last Human CEO
An AGI-led company wouldn’t just replicate individual workers; it would clone entire constellations of roles and workflows. This is a leap in “evolveability” as profound as the jump from single-celled to complex multicellular life.
This brings us to the “last human CEO.” They won’t be there because they are the best leader, but because the machines need a human face for the public. They’ll give interviews about “human-AI collaboration” while every meaningful decision is made by algorithms in the background. They will be the ultimate figurehead—powerful in appearance, but powerless in reality.
The peak of human achievement in business might be the moment we become completely unnecessary to it. Is this a dystopia or destiny? If we can align this power correctly, it could build a world where humans thrive. But we must be aware that power is a strong force, especially when it is sourced from intelligence and code.