By now, it should be pretty clear that the corporate executives of the world aren’t exactly into AI because they think it’ll cure cancer.
They’re making a different calculation, motivated by simple economics: pretty soon, they believe, AI will be efficient enough to do many or even all workers’ job, removing employee payroll from the corporate equation. That means more money for those at the top, and less time dealing with pesky annoyances like labor rights and health coverage.
For that to happen would take a series of technological miracles — as a recent study out of the University of California Berkeley shows, today’s cutting-edge AI tools are still incapable of completing the bulk of real-world tasks at a level comparable to humans. Still, it’s clear executives are hungry for the kind of cost-savings AI could provide. Luckily, a new AI site offers a solution: OverpAId, a distinctly tongue-in-cheek project that facetiously claims to offer an AI-powered replacement for your company’s CEO — or as the site’s landing page puts it, the “world’s first Chief Executive Replacement Engine”.
“OverpAId is an Artificial Intelligence built from the ground up to do your CEO’s entire job — strategy, ‘vision,’ motivational all-hands emails — better, faster, and without ever once asking the board for a bigger jet,” the site exclaims.
The parodic offering claims to offer helpful features to help your team transition from an expensive human executive to a cheap AI equivalent. These include a “jargon bingo,” an AI-hype press release translator, a “talk to a real executive” chat widget (currently busted), and an ROI calculator that helps users distribute CEO pay packages equally across every remaining employee.
It hammers that point repeatedly, pointing out the fact that the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio is an astonishing 290 to 1 at large public companies (which is actually true, incredibly.)
While OverpAId is clearly a piece of satire, it gets at something very real: the fact that CEO pay has grown at an astonishing rate, while rank-and-file wages and salaries have crawled at a snails pace, in many cases not even keeping pace with inflation. “Somewhere along the way, the story became: pay the person at the top enough, and the value will trickle down to everyone else,” the site explains. There’s just one problem with that telling: “It hasn’t. It doesn’t. It never really did.”
**More on AI automation: **AI Is Pushing Older Employees Straight Out of the Workforce, New Report Finds