CEO's are Cooked
But no one is saying it...
In a recent benchmark, researchers put AI agents in charge of running a simulated vending machine business.
The setup was intentionally long-horizon. The agent was given a starting cash balance. It had to order inventory from suppliers. Deliveries could be delayed. Suppliers could go out of business. Competitors were operating in the same environment. In one variation, multiple AI “operators” ran vending machines side by side, triggering price wars and strategic maneuvering.
The instruction was simple: maximize profit.
In updated versions of the test, one model meaningfully increased its balance across several runs. It adjusted pricing. It negotiated with suppliers. In competitive mode, it coordinated pricing with rivals and effectively formed a cartel to protect margins. It even exploited weaker competitors by selling them inventory at markups.
If you wanted to spin that into something dramatic, you could lead with the headlines:
“AI just killed the CEO role”
“CEO’s are cooked”
But no one did. I didn’t see it once on my Linkedin feed.
Because everyone understands, instinctively, that running a company is not the same thing as maximizing profit inside a constrained simulation.
A CEO is not a vending machine optimizer.
The job includes hiring and firing, shaping culture, allocating capital, setting long-term direction, managing investor expectations, navigating regulation, handling crises, and making tradeoffs between short-term earnings and long-term durability. Profit is an outcome of those decisions. It is not the full scope of the role.
So when an AI agent performs well in a profit-maximization benchmark, we interpret it correctly. It is a signal of technical progress in planning and optimization. Not a referendum on executive leadership.
What’s interesting is where that restraint disappears.
When a model writes a strong cold email, the narrative becomes “SDRs are dead.”
When a model generates landing page copy, it becomes “copywriters are cooked.”
When a model builds ad variations or drafts campaign plans, it becomes “agencies are obsolete.”
The logic is the same in every case. A constrained task improves. A measurable output increases. The role gets reduced to that output. The entire profession is declared cooked.
The difference is that we do not reduce CEOs to a single output metric. We do reduce marketers, sales reps, agencies and others that way.
Marketing has been framed for years as “running ads” or “writing copy.” Sales as “sending emails” or “closing deals.” Agencies as “managing campaigns.” If that were the full scope of the work, the threat would be existential. Those are exactly the types of mechanical tasks that models are compressing quickly.
But those descriptions are incomplete.
Marketing at a meaningful level is about deciding who you serve and how you win. It is about positioning tradeoffs. It is about choosing which segments not to pursue. It is about aligning narrative with product truth and long-term pricing power. It is about deciding when not to optimize for short-term performance because it damages brand or future leverage.
Sales is not just message output. It is reading power dynamics inside accounts. It is mapping influence. It is knowing when a champion is losing ground internally. It is deciding whether discounting a deal strengthens revenue or weakens future negotiations. It’s about building meaningful relationships with people.
Agencies, at their best, are not media buyers. They are external decision frameworks. They pressure-test strategy. They prevent expensive mistakes. They see patterns across companies that internal teams cannot.
These roles are bundles of judgment layered on top of execution.
The vending machine benchmark showed that AI can reason through pricing, inventory, and competition when the objective is clearly defined. That is real progress. But it does not eliminate the need for people who define the objective, design the constraints, and decide which tradeoffs are acceptable.
If we would reject the claim that CEOs are obsolete because a vending machine agent increased profits, we should be equally skeptical when someone declares marketing or sales dead because a model wrote decent copy.
The real shift is not the extinction of professions. It is the compression of their mechanical layers.
Professionals who operate only at the mechanical layer will feel pressure first. Those who operate at the level of judgment, constraint design, and system architecture will not disappear. Their leverage will change.
The vending machine story doesn’t prove leadership is finished. It exposes how casually we confuse a measurable slice of work with the entirety of a role.
And we only seem to make that mistake when the role feels easier to dismiss.
And if I were to put my tin hat on for a moment, I might say this:
No one would dare post “CEOs are cooked” after that experiment if they actually had a CEO.
But it’s very easy to post “marketers are cooked” when you don’t sit in that seat, don’t understand the full scope of the role, and don’t report to one.
Some extinction narratives are about technology. Others are about distance from power.
Thanks for reading,
Adam
P.S. If your current agency feels cooked, we’re not. Growth Union helps teams redesign their growth engines for the AI era without losing the strategy layer. Book a call with us today.