Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt broke down how he sees AI agents changing C-suite jobs - Business Insider

Eric Schmidt, formerly the chief executive of Google, has taken to the pages of Business Insider to sketch the C-suite of the future, and the sketch is mostly a mirror with a subscription fee. The former CEO describes AI assistants that check whether company activity aligns with a leader's values, which is a marvellous innovation: a machine that reads the boss's preferences back to the boss in a confident voice and charges by the token. One does wonder who audits the values-alignment, and against which values, and what happens on the quarterly call when the assistant reports that the activity and the values have quietly stopped speaking to each other.

Then the arithmetic, delivered with the breezy confidence of a man who has never queued at a job centre. Take a company of 10,000 employees; Schmidt guesses AI leaves "a couple of thousand people who you don't need." Not made redundant, not let go, not restructured into a bold new chapter — "who you don't need." It's the phrasing of a man clearing out a garage.

Note also the third duty: the assistant helps identify ways to increase profits. Machines that hunt efficiencies tend to find them in the payroll line, which is how we arrive back at the couple of thousand. The arithmetic we flagged when Anthropic trimmed its junior hiring has simply been promoted up the org chart: first the entry-level rungs, now the people who used to approve the rungs. Schmidt's agent will follow up on the projects, check the activity against the values, and file the savings. Whether anyone left is needed to read the report is, one suspects, a detail for the next conference panel.