Everyone Becomes a CEO

There's a shift happening that people are talking around but not naming directly.

Sam Altman talks about "one-person unicorns." Jensen Huang predicts 50,000 humans managing 100 million AI agents. McKinsey calls it the "agentic organization." Microsoft calls it the "frontier firm."

They're all circling something. I think it's this: everyone will operate like a CEO.

Not because everyone starts a company. Because work itself collapses to what CEOs do. Read updates. Form hypotheses. Delegate. Decide. Repeat. You won't write code. You won't do research manually. You won't context-switch between fifteen apps. You'll think and communicate. Everything else gets delegated.

What does that actually mean though?

I keep coming back to a simple model. An organization is just a hierarchy of metric accountability. Every level runs the same loop. You own a number. You guess what might move it. You ask someone to figure out if that guess is worth pursuing. You give them their own number that rolls up to yours. They do the same thing. All the way down.

That's it. Not a hierarchy of people. Not a communication structure. Just a recursive system for turning goals into actions.

Why does this matter for AI? Because I think the same constraints apply. Context is finite. Attention has costs. Specialization beats generalization for hard problems. These aren't human limitations. They're physics. Any system solving complex problems will end up looking like an organization. Maybe not exactly like ours. But something similar.

So if you want AI agents that scale, you probably don't build one god-agent that does everything. You build agent organizations. Agent VPs with budgets. Agent managers who estimate costs. Metrics that roll up.

And what's the interface? I think it's Slack. Or whatever you use to talk to your human team. Not a CLI. Not a dashboard. Just messages.

CEOs don't log into software. Things come to them. They message people and things happen. Your AI org should probably work the same way. DM an agent. Get a response. Get updates without asking. Assign tasks. Review work.

I don't know if this is right. But I keep thinking: we're all about to become CEOs. And I'm not sure we have the organizational infrastructure to make that work.