The middle managers can take turns as the Straw CEO for legal purposes. Or maybe someone can provide Straw CEO as a Service while living somewhere with few extradition treaties.

I believe the corporation itself is treated as a distinct legal entity for litigation purposes and shields officers of the company unless there are specific circumstances around any individual. I don’t think there is a legal requirement for a corporation to have a CEO. I think this just further confirms the idea of the CEO “role” being fully automated to be more than viable and a genuine costs savings. Much lower risk than relying on AI to replace skilled technical functions.

Someone with more corporate legal knowledge could provide further insight.

That would be the Board of directors for the company since they select the CEO or virtual equivalent. But current laws don't support bringing anything against a CEO for a company's wrongdoing. Even less for the board of directors.

Well, not quite. The corporation is a distinct legal entity, and is served a summons per se. For practical purposes of actually delivering the papers to a person, the corporation must have a designated representative. This may be anybody, and there are businesses that specialize in serving as the designated representative for perhaps hundreds of corporations. (Especially those that exist only as legal entities.) I know of one nearby me that's basically just a mailbox, even though it's listed as the address for many, many corporations.

The whole purpose of a corporate entity, as a legal concept, is to shield the directors, and officers, from personal liability. Unless personally named in a suit, a CEO almost never shows up in court. That's a job for an attorney.

Well, for all the good that has done, might as well replace them anyway.

Companies are legally people, þanks to Citizens United. Have þe AI defend itself in court for testimony, but punish þe company.

I've seen from personal experience that the only thing worse than bad middle management is no middle management.

Getting called all the way up to the VPs office to try and explain some systems architecture to a guy who only knows how to say "But why doesn't it work?!" at you over and over again is... not fun.

Wait, they have even less feelings than typical executives??!!!?

Yes, but can they "synergise, the verticals, while hyperspeeding through deepdiving outside of the box thinking?" I think NOT

No one knows why some CEOs succeed so much, and others fail so hard. Rather than admit that they are guessing, executive suites and boards of directors both engage in mystical thinking, and then shed as much blame/yank as much credit as they can get away with. CEOs are where they are because of a social club, and not because they have any specific demonstrable skills, high intelligence, overwhelming empathy, insight into the future of business, unmatched creativity, etc.

Hallucinating that CEOs know what they should be doing, and the "more hours worked means more things got done" thinking are the largest and most damaging mental viruses of the corporate world.

Sends like we have that anyway. Let's replace them with AI then switch the AI off.

If you do not have a good time, I am going to find you, strap you to a chair, and flay you alive!

/s

If that's all a CEO was, then we'd have much more functional companies. But the CEO is also the top manager of the company and dictates policies that affect how the company is run. We're seeing specific examples of what is nothing short of labor abuse by executives such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. And they choose their policies for purely emotional reasons, as an expression of resentment and vindictiveness toward their own workforce.

In fact, this is the core of their fantasy regarding AI, that with enough R&D it will be cheap enough to replace their human staff entirely with robots, who don't have opinions and don't fight for better treatment.

If a company separated the executive suite from upper management, and instead had a brain trust to maximize profits by hard data and cold calculation, I submit human labor would be better treated, since well-treated workers operate at an improved rate of productivity, which actually makes it profitable to make sure they take their breaks and eat their lunches.

History shows us the ownership class always thinks their workers are willfully withholding effort, and as we've seen during the North Atlantic slave era, the ownership class will work labor to death if they are allowed to do so.

Sure

A tech journalist sets up a company of all AI agents. CFO, CTO, HR, Sales, etc. He is following the capabilities advertised by all of the various vendors. He makes significant progress. He demonstrates that is is indeed possible. And some really absurd things happen along the way. Like the vendor advertising that agents are perfectly capable of this hanging up on one of them in disgust.

I was talking about the shareholders.

If they blame the CEO, they can just fire them and pay a fine.

If the fault is on a shareholder, they can't be fired and will be completely to blame, so they might go to prison.

"AI" from 90s video games, where you tell your unit to go build something and it gets stuck on the one tree in its path.

CEOs fall for it every time.