I’m a senior executive with almost 2 decades of experience both at startups and large tech companies. Most recently I joined a VC backed startup right before the AI boom started to drive GTM and sales. It is a small company and I report to the CEO. …
My biggest issue is that I am getting increasingly frustrated with the CEO’s constant reliance on AI for everything. It is honestly like working with “Claude as the CEO”. There are literally copy-paste passages as “strategy” that Claude spits out on slack as guidelines. There is not even an effort to hide or think through it anymore. I use it for work too but I see it as a tool to help refine my thoughts—not tell me how to run a business.
To someone’s suggestion that they share their concerns with a board member they trust, they replied:
I’ve worked for startups before. I did my due diligence before signing up for this one. The CEO is actually board appointed and not the founder. He is quite experienced. We worked well together at the beginning but over the past 6-8 months it has progressively gotten worse.
I don’t see going to board as being the right choice. Specially given the slow growth of the business.
Another commenter seeing their CEO become a Claude messenger:
I also report to the CEO and there were a couple times I asked her a question for input and got copy pasta from AI. The second or third time I was like, “Look, I can ask AI myself, but I asked you.” It prompted a further discussion about how I’m asking her to make sure we’re covering both the expectations of her and the client and give her an opportunity to tell my any information she has in her head that she hasn’t shared yet, since I wasn’t a party to a lot of the conversations, and I can pair those with AI suggestions myself. She stopped.
Another commenter talking about their supervisor’s behavior being in keeping with other “millennials and boomers”:
Worked in the strategic finance team at one of the largest software companies in world. My team mostly filled with millennials and boomers (50s+).
I am really pissed on how most of them use AI tools, my supervisor used claude like religion, where she basically generated everything out of it, from email replies, reports, and even strategic presentations. And she openly admitted that all of it were AI generated in the meeting room and nobody really cares to check it, they just agreed to all of it quickly.
And I really hate it when they thought that AI results are words from Almighty and always 100% correct. These people should learn more on how to use AI.
I am calling these people’s as “servants of AI.”
Another commenter talking about senior folks:
Seeing this in other roles where a senior or lead is essentionally doing zero review, fact checking, scrutininy, quality assurance, critical thinking, analysis etc. of AI output.
Then, calling it out is seen as not adopting AI or you get tagged in to fix everything. You also get the pleasure of being seen as antagonistic for barely hanging on to your sanity while most people around you do not even try to make it look they they are doing their fucking jobs.
You are also elitist or racist for correcting grammar on public facing work content, spelling mistakes or suggesting we don’t need to use the same recycled jargon.
You should generally downgrade reddit anecdotal evidence, but I’m seeing increasingly more examples of this myself unfortunately so they all rang true/plausible.
The anecdotes from this thread on r/careeradvice seem like gradual (self-)disempowerment:
Senior Executive at a startup, tired of dealing with Claude as the CEO. Anyone else in similar situation?
OP:
To someone’s suggestion that they share their concerns with a board member they trust, they replied:
Another commenter seeing their CEO become a Claude messenger:
Another commenter talking about their supervisor’s behavior being in keeping with other “millennials and boomers”:
Another commenter talking about senior folks:
You should generally downgrade reddit anecdotal evidence, but I’m seeing increasingly more examples of this myself unfortunately so they all rang true/plausible.