Written by: Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. Originally published in WorkLife by London Inc.
Should you build an AI clone of your CEO?
Meta is reportedly building a Mark Zuckerberg AI clone. Is this a good thing?
A real, not at all dystopian sounding news story from the last couple weeks: Mark Zuckerberg is building an AI clone.
The Meta CEO and founder, according to the Financial Times, has been working with what the paper describes as “an artificial intelligence version of Mark Zuckerberg that can engage with employees in his stead, as part of a broader push to remake the Big Tech company around AI.”
According to sources within the company, the idea is to create a digital CEO “trained on the billionaire’s mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies.”
Why, you ask? So employees can talk with digi-Zuck and feel “more connected to the founder through interactions with it,” the company said.
Zuckerberg is not the first CEO that has sought to replicate themselves with an AI double — CEOs from Zoom and Klarna both used AI avatars in earnings calls last year, although in both cases it seemed mostly like a gimmick to show off developing AI capabilities. But Zuckerberg’s digital cloning project seems to have a slightly different goal, with more of a company-facing bent to give employees greater access to the CEO.
It is an interesting new use case for AI avatars: “Instant, AI-mediated access to your ultimate boss, and the illusion that he is directly supervising all employees, controlling every last piece of the company,” as Miles Klee at Wired summarized it.
Presumably, the case for the Zuckbot is to give the average Meta employee, who previously had about zero chance of facetime with pre-clone Zuckerberg, to now be able to dial him up. Klee, however, isn’t buying it on a practical level. “[CEOs] can’t be in multiple places at once. There’s no proof, however, that this technology can eliminate the distance between a commander and their ground troops, or that such proximity would automatically benefit both the employees and the company at large.”
Paul Armstrong, founder of advisory firm TBD Group, also raised an eyebrow at the notion, questioning whether employees will be as enamoured with it as Zuckerberg seems to be.
“If users struggle to distinguish between a system and a person, employees interacting with an AI version of the CEO will do the same,” he wrote. “Executives adopting these systems assume more access to leadership voice improves clarity, and increased output feels like progress. Underneath, a different pattern is emerging. Every additional AI interaction increases the number of decisions made inside the organization, and total error rates rise sharply.”
The digital revolution meets the handshake
Amid the dehumanizing maze of online hiring, job fairs are making a powerful comeback
Could good old-fashioned job fairs be the answer to a very broken hiring process that jobseekers are looking for?
Last week, several media outlets in London covered the London and Area Works Job Fair, which drew a couple thousand attendees. As we theorized in London Inc. Weekly, the demand might reflect both high unemployment as well as a growing sense among jobseekers that in-person recruitment opportunities may offer a better chance at landing a gig than the spray-and-pray methods of online applications.
At similar job fairs elsewhere in the country, that second sentiment keeps popping up. “Having an opportunity like this to find vendors that are actually looking [to hire] is amazing,” said one employer at a job fair in Kanata. A BIA director said the job fair environment “makes it more efficient for [employers] and for jobseekers.”
To the question of whether they are making a comeback, there’s some tentative evidence that the job fair model might hold promise in the age of AI dominant hiring. A recent survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that after years of pre-pandemic decline, the number of people attending career fairs is climbing again, both on the attendee and employer side. “Clearly, both groups prefer to attend career fairs in-person,” the survey stated.
Official data backs it up. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis wrote that they were starting to see signs that in-person recruitment events were something more employers and jobseekers were prioritizing. “At the in-person job fairs, the whole application and hiring process seems quicker and more streamlined,” said one business advisor. Another added, “I’ve had jobseekers say thank you for putting them on, because it gives them an opportunity to actually talk directly with HR folks, and of course HR people are happy to see them as well. These events can be very successful for everyone.”
The momentum might be gradual, but set against the bleak landscape of hiring in the AI age, local economic officials are making the case for the old-school approach.
“It gets your employer brand out there. You get to talk to people about your company, you get to have that face-to-face conversation,” said the London and Area Works’ Christine Wilton. “There is a lot here and the more people you bring together, the more people you attract.”
So, your employee made an app
Seems workers everywhere are spinning up their own SaaS tools. What could possibly go wrong with that?
For several years now, there have been complaints about ‘app sprawl’ — the phenomenon of work-related apps and software expanding out of control, leaving workers with a larger and larger suite of tools (think having to click between Slack, Outlook, a calendar app and so on.) In 2024, the Harvard Business Review found that the average knowledge worker used approximately 30 separate apps per day, and switch between them nearly 3,000 times.
Enter new AI coding tools like Claude Code, which have shaken the software-as-a-service (SaaS) markets in recent months on the assumption that the army of SaaS companies offering productivity apps could be in jeopardy of being replaced. Optimistically, some have hoped that the rise of omni-function AI agents and tools could streamline the software stack.
It does not appear that that is what is happening, however. Instead, reports Business Insider, large companies are dealing with the opposite problem — not only do companies still rely on a bunch of semi-integrated software tools, but employees are now constantly spinning up their own AI versions of the programs. Business Insider reports on an internal report from Amazon that found “AI is making our tool duplication problem worse,” noting that “more duplication is being created faster, and less of it is being cleaned up.”
Makes sense, in a way: give everyone the ability to quickly create a bespoke tool, and it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of people end up making similar things. “Generative AI is driving what some call AI sprawl,” writes Business Insider’s Eugene Kim, “a surge of AI tools and autonomous agents that risks overwhelming companies’ centralized oversight and security controls.”
Even Slack, which is both a legacy SaaS product and heavily invested in AI, recognizes this is a problem. “We’re piling more and more productivity apps onto the stack, hoping it’ll make us faster, but it’s only making the maze more complicated,” they wrote in a corporate blog. “And now AI has arrived on the scene. As leaders, we need to be thoughtful about how we implement this new technology. If we’re not careful, we’ll simply trade app sprawl for AI sprawl.”
Chat, write my obituary
Death is inevitable, but when your CEO asks you to use AI to draft your own obituary, it’s unsettling, to say the least
In the first journalism-school class I attended, the day’s project was to write obituaries for each other. It’s standard J-school stuff: a fun way to practice interviewing one another, turning notes into articles and writing to a format.
It is maybe just a little more morbid and less fun, though, to be a Verizon employee, where CEO Dan Schulman, in an effort to be “blunt” with staff about the impact of AI, is having them use AI to write their own obituaries. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Schulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives.”
It’s possible that however well-intentioned this might have been, that it may have failed to read the room a little bit.
However well-intentioned the exercise might have been, it probably failed to read the room. “It was meant to spark reflection about legacy, but for a workforce already worried about job security, the exercise felt more like a bad omen — workers ceding the pen to the robot writing the last chapter of their mortal careers,” reads a blog by the Teamsters, poking fun at the exercise.
Others in The Wall Street Journal comment section had similar thoughts. “When the CEO asks you to write your obituary you know it’s time to start looking for another job,” wrote one. “Ask ChatGPT to write your obituary, because that’s not morbid or telling at all,” wrote another.
Schulman, however, was sticking to his guns. The CEO (who is on record saying AI will cause 20 per cent to 30 per cent unemployment within the next two to five years), said the exercise was simply one of transparency. “It’s a very difficult time, and everyone knows it,” he said. “Like it or not, we live in the age of AI. I happen to like it.”
Which, of course, is much easier to say when you’re not the one in the obituary.
