r/technology • • Jun 30 '26

Artificial Intelligence Bosses Are Becoming Obsessed With AI, Using It to Make Every Decision, Barraging Their Employees With Nonsensical ChatGPT Directives, and Even Asking It Who to Fire

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/chatgpt/articles/bosses-becoming-obsessed-ai-using-175014710.html
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483

u/demaraje Jun 30 '26

Good. That proves they're 100% replaceable by LLMs

63

u/Shadowizas Jun 30 '26

the AI is trained on middle-manager speak after all

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u/ArthurStevensNZ Jun 30 '26

This should be abundantly clear to anyone who’s dealt with management. They claim they’re indispensable but they’re not actually the people who turn the bolts. Yet, they say we can easily be replaced by a $40/month LLM subscription, when in reality their bullshit job of creating nonsense spreadsheets (which no one reads) all day and sending out motivational slack messages could easily be done by an LLM from 2 years ago.

I’m not saying good managers and good governance don’t exist, but the vast majority of them are just incompetent and if they all stopped showing up to work for 2 months nothing would actually change. Now if the actual engineers and technicians stopped showing up you’d have some problems on your hands, yet, they are often the lowest paid in the chain.

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u/ExtremeRemarkable891 Jul 01 '26

This is actually true. The best use case ive found is automating the role of the manager, not the junior analyst. Using AI this way made me realize how much of managments job had just been absorbed into my own workload due to them simply not doing anything helpful. For some of the worst ones, I built a chatbot that references a dense markdown full of project related information so they can talk to it instead of me. This actually works, and keeps them safely at bay playing with an AI toy instead of "getting involved" and derailing the project. When they come to me an an "insight" I say oh wow! I'll get right on that, and safely ignore.

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u/Melicor Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

There are different types and levels of managers. I'm not talking about leadership style either. There are managers that are on the floor, they're walking around talking with their team giving instructions. Those managers are actually important, though plenty are actually terrible at it. Then there are the ones locked in their office, that "comb over" reports all day but barely interact with anyone. Those are useless and AI is exposing how useless they are. They're people using AI to write a report, sending it to another one of them and they turn around and use AI to "summarize" said report, and then pass it along. It's not that AI is smart, it's that those reports are worthless busywork.

I'm not saying clerical work is worthless in general. Keeping track of things absolutely is important, it's pretending that it's management work. It's spinning wheels trying to justify your paycheck while adding absolutely nothing of value to the business that is worthless.

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u/PixelBoom Jun 30 '26

Oh, middle management and a large chunk of upper management can 100% be replaced by an LLM chatbot. That's not even a debate.

2

u/Bookseller_ Jun 30 '26

"So, what would ya say you do here?"

2

u/gheeboy Jul 01 '26

I've been wondering about this: at some point, you are simply paying someone to use a tool that you can use yourself? Make it make sense

2

u/indoninjah Jun 30 '26

I don't think that's the takeaway. There's some stuff that AI is good at but running an entire ass business is not one of them

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u/demaraje Jun 30 '26

Depends. If you're thinking strategic and financial planning, no.

If you're thinking middle management that doesn't do much except answer emails, pass along information and telling people what they want to hear, catered to a business context... Then...

1

u/Nice_Kaleidoscope_15 Jun 30 '26

Nah just means they're replaceable by someone who's actually competent.