Mark Zuckerberg is building a personal AI agent to help him run Meta, and the move has reignited a debate that the tech industry has long been circling: could AI one day replace the most senior roles in business?
According to reports, the still-in-development system is designed to help Zuckerberg access information more quickly, cutting through the layers of management and communication that would ordinarily slow executive decision-making. Rather than waiting for answers to filter up through multiple teams, the agent retrieves data on demand, functioning, in effect, as an always-on executive briefing tool.
The development is part of a broader push at Meta to embed AI across its entire workforce. Employees are already using internal tools, including ‘Second Brain’, which organises documents and surfaces institutional knowledge, and ‘My Claw’, a personalised AI agent that can communicate with other employees’ agents. AI-driven impact has even been incorporated into staff performance reviews.
Zuckerberg has been open about his ambitions. On an earnings call earlier this year, he said Meta was “elevating individual contributors and flattening teams,” adding: “If we do this, then I think that we’re going to get a lot more done.” Meta’s CFO separately reported that output per engineer has risen 30% since the start of 2025, driven largely by AI coding agents.
But the question of whether AI can truly step into the C-suite, or whether it should, is one that security and technology leaders are pushing back on.
Charlotte Wilson, head of enterprise at Check Point Software, argues that framing AI as a replacement for leadership misses the point entirely. “I don’t think AI will replace senior leadership; I think it will fundamentally reshape it,” she said. “AI can absolutely empower people across an organisation to make better decisions and be more productive, but we’re in a dangerous moment where we’re expecting ever-greater productivity from people, and I worry we’re raising a generation that won’t know how to wheel it back when something goes wrong.”
Wilson points to a particular risk through the cybersecurity lens. “At some point, when systems take down your company, you need to be able to go back to pen and paper and the basics. If your senior leaders have never had to apply themselves in those ways, because AI has always been there to do it, you risk a C-suite that has effectively deskilled at the top of the organisation, without the experience to know what to do when it goes wrong. You’re creating multiple single points of failure, right up to the leadership level.”
She also raises concerns about the information gap currently facing executive teams. “C-suites are being shown the productivity gains and the profitability gains, but they’re not being shown the risks in a way they can actually engage with. I’m talking about data leakage, oversharing of sensitive data, manipulation through deepfakes, and ethical failures that could make a company socially unacceptable. That gap is widening.”
Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress, draws a clear line between the advisory and decision-making roles. “We should think of AI as an advisor, not a leader. AI can be trusted to crunch data and identify market patterns, but it lacks the essential human qualities needed for the top job. When it comes to risk and security, the ultimate accountability must always remain with a human in the C-Suite.” He adds a pointed aside for any boards tempted by the cost argument: “Given the astronomical size of executive salaries and annual bonuses, perhaps the C-suite is exactly where we should be assessing how AI could step in to save the company the most money.”
Matt Conlon, CEO and co-founder at Cytidel, is equally direct. “In short, no. I don’t see AI replacing senior leadership, but I do see AI and carefully crafted agentic workflows fundamentally changing how people in those roles operate.” For Conlon, the human case for leadership ultimately rests on creativity and accountability. “People are visionaries, and that will never be replicated. If you remove humans from leadership, you end up with the same playbooks running on repeat. The lack of originality gets stale and fast.”
His conclusion carries a warning for those inclined to sit on the fence: “AI won’t replace CEOs, but CEOs who embrace AI will replace those who don’t.”
Whether Zuckerberg’s experiment succeeds or not, it has already done one thing: made the question of AI in the C-suite impossible to ignore.
