CEOs are building digital doubles. Senior executives at major tech firms are experimenting with AI — creating photorealistic avatars, audio and video simulations and centralized systems so they can appear more frequently to employees, customers and partners without adding hours to their calendars.

Leadership on loop Senior executives at major tech firms are experimenting with artificial intelligence to scale their presence inside and outside their companies. Projects range from photorealistic, three-dimensional avatars of chief executives to audio and video simulations that can deliver prepared remarks or answer routine questions. The experiments are meant to let leaders appear more frequently without adding hours to their calendars. That push is driven in part by impatience inside the industry. Executives privately and publicly complain that many organisations and consumers remain sceptical of AI, and that adoption by large companies hasn't always produced the fast, lucrative efficiencies that were promised. Still, top executives are pressing forward, betting that AI can compress distance between them and rank-and-file employees, customers, and partners. Meta Platforms is building what company insiders describe as a photorealistic, three-dimensional avatar of Mark Zuckerberg. The avatar is being trained on his public remarks, gestures and stated views so it can answer employees’ questions and stand in for the chief executive in some interactions, according to people familiar with the project. Meta is also developing other AI characters users will be able to interact with on Facebook and Instagram. A spokesperson for Meta didn't respond to a request for comment on the avatar project. Other high-profile leaders have tested similar ideas. Last year, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, chief executive of Klarna, and Eric Yuan, chief executive of Zoom, used AI-generated versions of themselves to deliver parts of earnings calls. Those appearances signalled that executives are thinking about delegating routine communication duties to simulations. Flattening the org chart At Block, chief executive Jack Dorsey has pursued a different route: using centralised AI to reduce managerial layers. In February, Block announced a large workforce reduction as part of a shift to lean more on machine intelligence. In a recent interview on the podcast Long Strange Trip, Dorsey outlined a plan to compress the number of people between him and any employee. "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's no layer, everyone in the company reports to me, and that would be all 6,000 of the company." His remarks show how leaders imagine AI as both a tool and an organisational redesign: a single intelligence layer that mediates tasks, decisions and communications so a single executive can appear to oversee more people directly. For employees, that can mean quicker access to guidance. For unions, regulators and boards, it makes people wonder about accountability and oversight. How the tech works — and what it delivers These leader-focused systems use several techniques already common in AI-driven products. They draw on large language models to generate answers, and on synthetic-media systems to mimic voice and facial movements. Training data can include public speeches, interviews and other recorded appearances. The intent is to produce believable output that reflects a leader’s priorities and tone.

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Executives are testing AI replicas and organisational redesign to extend their reach — a shift that raises hard questions about accountability, oversight and what leadership will mean when a CEO can be everywhere at once.

This article was created with AI assistance.