I was wondering what HN thinks about this, would this be possible in the near future?
- To write outlines for company-wide emails. Someone going on mat leave? Rather than Google how to structure such an announcement, get ChatGPT to give the outline and colour in the blanks with my own personal voice. Saves 80% of time and avoids having to pile another thing on my EA where they themselves are a high leverage knowledge worker delegating things to ChatGPT as appropriate. Makes us both more efficient.
- To sharpen my emails tone and clarity in written negotiation. I'll have it parrot back what it thinks the key points are, and where not clear enough, I'll re-write the email. Alternatively, I'll have it write a response email to me and then preempt the points it makes. I find that it's able to reason at the level of a typical counterparty executive so it can accelerate the game theory during negotiation. It is bar clearing here.
- To fill in domain gaps. How do you calculate contribution margin again? What about in an SQL query? Can you put that into clear steps I can email to someone? Again this isn't always right or appropriate but it can be quite useful to avoid having to shoulder tap someone on the team to explain something within their domain. I find I do less pointy-haired-bossing of technical topics this way than I might if not (e.g. a year ago).
In general the CEO role requires origination of resource allocation and strategy decisions, where ChatGPT requires a smart user to make meaning of the outputs. Someone has to be experienced enough to say 'Hmm, that output email for that negotiation isn't quite right from experience'. That may change in the future, but that would be approaching AGI, in which case a lot more things would change than the CEO role.
A lot of what CEOs do I'd argue is low removal cost to all stakeholders. I often test this by not responding to emails on vacation and see if anything suffers. And the reality is not much suffers. But if you choose the wrong leader for a function... every stakeholder in the company feels it. So a lot it is basically 'Choose the right people and give them the right aims' and sit on your hands in between to avoid confusing people with conflicting messaging. It's a weird job.