According to the people building today’s most powerful things: A.I. In the model, CEOs quickly become obsolete. Sundar Pichai, president of Google’s parent company Alphabet, said: He said the CEO role is “one of the easiest things” for AI.. Sam Altman said: He would be embarrassed if OpenAI wasn’t the first big company run by an AI CEO.. These are provocative statements, not just about bold predictions about future AI capabilities but also about assumptions about the nature of leadership. Ultimately, these views are based on the following assumptions: Every part of a senior leader’s role can be reduced to a series of algorithmic operations..
This idea has deep roots. Milton Friedman distilled long-held views about the role business leaders should play, arguing that the only responsibility of corporations is to maximize returns to shareholders while operating within limited social norms. In this perspective, business is a game with defined goals, a fixed set of rules, and objectively better and worse decisions that can be determined by analytical processes. Therefore, the ideal CEO is one who makes the right bets and follows the optimal strategy. And if that’s what leadership is all about, there is in principle no role that cannot be performed by an algorithm. Pichai and Altman would be right to think that sufficiently advanced AI could completely replace human CEOs.
Rethink your business purpose
But there are other traditions that have at least as strong claims about how business should be understood. For example, Peter Drucker, widely known as the founder of modern management theory, identified the corporation as a fundamental social institution rather than an economic machine that happens to exist within society. Indeed, for Drucker, the corporation is the defining social institution of modernity and one of the primary structures by which humans organize their collective lives.
In Drucker’s view, making a profit is a necessary condition for business survival, just as oxygen is necessary for the survival of individual human beings. But it is not the purpose of business any more than breathing is the purpose of human life. An algorithmic approach to business helps you pursue your goals and analyze trade-offs. But they cannot decide for themselves what is worth pursuing. This question influences human judgments about the values, meanings, and purposes that individuals and communities choose to serve.
The choice between Drucker’s painting and the one proposed by Friedman is itself an example of such a decision. So if defining and refining the purpose of the business is part of the CEO’s role, Pichai and Altman are wrong. There is at least one element of leadership that algorithms cannot perform.
new danger
When CEOs and board members make decisions about questions like these, they start with a basic premise. Leaders hold on to assumptions about what things really are: what the company is, what the customers are, what the employees are. They include assumptions about what can be known and what counts as evidence. They have assumptions about what is right and how competing obligations should be weighed. Most people unconsciously hold these assumptions and treat them as a matter of common sense rather than as the result of a conscious choice. But if they are not explored, they create blind spots that no amount of sophisticated strategy can compensate for.
AI is making these blind spots dangerous in new ways. Philosophical commitments such as assumptions about communication, evidence, causation, and risk are built into every AI tool a company employs. Some of these are consciously chosen by developers who will never encounter organizations using their products. Some emerge from the process by which an algorithm interacts with training data. At a time when shared assumptions about core values are already crumbling across society, CEOs and board members who fail to question these embedded assumptions will find their organizations adopting philosophical commitments they have neither considered nor chosen. This is exactly the kind of fundamental risk that boards exist to oversee. But most boards aren’t even aware it’s happening, let alone prepared to do anything about it.
The ability to surface a philosophical assumption, investigate it, and reason about it can definitely improve business decisions. A recent widely read article titled “Philosophy Undermines AI” argued that philosophical thinking can sharpen strategies and improve profits. This may be true. However, the assumptions that leaders and boards need to consider most urgently are not limited to optimization problems. They are the foundation on which the business itself is built.
When leadership involves decisions that cannot be delegated to an algorithm, leaders need the discipline to make those decisions properly. Business leaders don’t need to be academic philosophers. But you need to develop the working capacity to recognize, question, and reason about the underlying assumptions that shape your decisions. And boards need this ability, at least urgently, if they are to serve as an effective oversight layer for their companies. When CEOs deploy AI tools that encode philosophical commitments that even the board cannot identify, it becomes a fundamental governance blind spot. Developing the philosophical skills to bring these issues to the surface is as essential today as basic technology and financial literacy were for previous generations of leaders.
What the board of directors can do now
So what does building this capacity look like in practice, especially at the board level?Here are three starting points.
1. Treat philosophical literacy as a board competency. Most boards audit the board composition for financial expertise, industry knowledge, and operational experience. Few people wonder whether those around the table have the ability to question basic assumptions, such as what a company owes its employees beyond a salary, where the line is between acceptable and unacceptable uses of its products, or what the company actually is. This is a governance gap that will only widen as AI incorporates more and more philosophical choices into business operations. Closing the board does not necessarily mean appointing a philosopher to the board. But it means making sure someone is asking those questions and ensuring that the board is taking those questions as seriously as the numbers.
2. Require an impact assessment of objectives and principles when reviewing major AI implementations. Before approving a significant AI tool or platform, the board should request a brief statement of the philosophical assumptions it encodes. What assumptions do you make about the customer? Is the customer a source of extractable data or a party to the relationship? What are you optimizing for? And what are acceptable trade-offs? Whose values shaped the system’s default settings? Are you sharing them? These are not technical questions and should not be left to technology teams. If no one on your executive team or board can answer this question, your organization is adopting a philosophical approach it has never considered before. Boards do not approve large investments without understanding the financial implications. No one should approve the implementation of AI at scale without understanding the philosophical commitment it brings to the company.
3. Conduct annual alignment reviews. Once a year, ask your board to consider one fundamental question. It’s about who and what you are responsible for. What do we believe about the people we serve? What would we refuse to do, even under economic pressure? Then compare that answer to the assumptions that are actually built into the tools, partnerships, and processes your company has adopted over the past 12 months. When these diverge, the organization’s philosophical commitments are adrift. Not because anyone tried to change it, but because no one was looking.
The real risk is not that AI will replace CEOs. Most importantly, AI is already replacing leadership capabilities. The judgment questions what an organization is, what it represents, and what it treats as truth. These are decisions that no algorithm can make, and are decisions that the board of directors exists to oversee. Leaders and boards that fail to understand that this change is occurring are already beginning to lose control of it.
About the author
Faisal Hoque is on a mission to humanize organizational change and bridge the gap between technological and human potential. He is the founder of companies such as SHADOKA and NextChapter, and a three-time winner of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 and Fast 500™ awards.
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