This Startup Just Promoted an AI to CEO

Does your company need a human CEO? Not anymore, according to a website-building startup, HeyBoss. The company just replaced its human CEO, Xiaoyin Qu, with an AI named Astra last week, according to AIM Research. If your company employs people, you need a CEO who can attract and motivate talented people, adapt the company’s strategy swiftly and effectively to rapidly changing industry headwinds and tailwinds, and invent entirely new products as the company’s core ones mature and decline. Can an AI CEO do all of those things? Should your company follow suit? The answer depends. What Does HeyBoss Do? HeyBoss builds websites, apps, or games within nine minutes. Having tried to build my own website with tools like Wix, the company sounds like it’s delivering a quantum value leap—much more user benefit for the money than existing products or services. As I noted in Hungry Startup Strategy, a QVL is why a customer would take the risk of buying from a startup instead of an established company—and HeyBoss seems to offer one. The company enables users to “input a product idea in a single line be it a website, app, or game, and within nine minutes, it produces a live product complete with real design, clean code, back-end infrastructure, optimized copy, search engine optimization, and hosting,” AIM Research wrote. Why Did HeyBoss Replace Its CEO? Astra, the new CEO, has taken on more responsibility over time, and has undergone “months” of testing. She first started out working on making the company’s online games better—helping refine visuals, optimize code, and accelerate production. Qu’s team realized Astra could optimize apps and website development as well—opening up a 100-fold larger opportunity, Qu told AIM Research. As HeyBoss expanded to enable users to generate or upload their projects, access personal workspaces, and tap a public community feed, Astra took on more responsibility. Since December, Astra has outperformed humans by taking on “thousands of projects simultaneously, adapting in real time, and generating fully operational digital products in under 10 minutes,” AIM Research reported. On April 8, Qu announced Astra’s promotion to CEO—which is an eye-catching way of saying Astra coordinates AI programs performing functions such as engineering, designing, product management, writing, and SEO tasks. In effect, Astra is a specialized application of Salesforce’s Agentforce, which coordinates the operation of so-called agentic AI. As I noted in my book Brain Rush: How to Invest and Compete in the Real World of Generative AI, agentic AI can act as an admin of sorts, and can perform tasks like planning a vacation— choosing the best flights, hotels, and restaurants. But it has limitations. In the case of HeyBoss, I think there is less than meets the eye. Astra’s job sounds to me more like the chief operating officer of a collection of software programs. Having said that, I admire the strategic logic of Qu’s decision. As she wrote in her public announcement, promoting Astra was “one of my toughest [decisions],” made in response to customers who told Qu that Astra is “faster, smarter, more reliable than you,” reported AIM Research. Ouch! Is Your Company Ready for an AI boss? First ask yourself: What does a CEO do? Why does one person have all those job responsibilities? Which of those jobs can AI do better than a human? Which of these tasks still require a highly skilled person? Does your company make physical products or provide services? If your company delivers a service, it could be a candidate for an AI CEO. For the AI CEO to outperform a human one, the following conditions must be met: All your service’s business activities can be performed by AI faster and more effectively than by people. You can build an AI agent—like Astra—to coordinate these activity-specific AIs. Your AI agent can perform coordination tasks quickly and effectively as demand for the service increases. But if your company employs people, an AI CEO may not be in the cards at the moment. That’s because there does not seem to be compelling evidence an AI can do a better job of attracting and motivating talented people to realize a compelling vision for a company. What’s more, an AI CEO has yet to demonstrate the skills needed to create a company’s future. For now, while many people are not good at these tasks, a human CEO is also essential to adapting the company’s strategy to changing industry headwinds and tailwinds and inventing entirely new growth curves. EXPERT OPINION BY PETER COHAN, FOUNDER, PETER S. COHAN & ASSOCIATES @PETERCOHAN