I expect they excel in buzz-words, meaningless company values, organisation changes, and so on, that real CEOs seem to find is their most important business.
I expect it wasn't anything like that.
The simulation was a coarse-grained digital twin of the U.S. automotive industry, incorporating mathematical models based on real data of car sales, market shifts, historical pricing strategies and elasticity, as well as broader influences like economic trends and the effects of Covid-19.... The goal of the game was simple — survive as long as possible without being fired by a virtual board while maximizing market cap.
I have been thinking of creating a simulation game like this, both for fun and education. However in my game you would chose a real CEO of a real car company, and see if you could do better. Would you beat Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who increased the company's market cap by over 100 times in ten years (and received no income because an investor with 9 shares successfully argued in court that he didn't deserve it)? Or would you suffer the same fate as Nissan head
Carlos Ghosn, who avoided prison by being smuggled out of Japan in a shipping crate? Or perhaps you would prefer to be
Mary Barra, still drawing a salary of $28 million despite GM's market cap being lower today than it was 10 years ago.
OTOH you might not want to be Stellantis CEO
Carlos Tavares, who is probably on the the skids as we speak. And you certainly wouldn't want to be 77 year old former Volkswagen CEO
Martin Winterkorn, facing up to 10 years for fraud and market manipulation over emission cheating devices - if he lives that long.
Or would you? Many people here claim that Musk is an idiot who did more to hurt Tesla that help it. With their superior intelligence they probably think turning Stellantis or VW around would be doable, and fixing GM, Ford or Toyota's woes would be a piece of cake.
Seems to me that it would be easy for an AI to beat
some of these CEOs' performances, but only in an environment devoid of the human factor. This is what they found too.
GPT-4o’s performance as a CEO was remarkable. The LLM consistently outperformed top human participants on nearly every metric...
However, there was a critical flaw: GPT-4o was fired faster by the virtual board than the students who played the game.
Why? The AI struggled with black swan events — such as market collapses during the Covid-19 pandemic... [it] locked into a short-term optimization mindset, relentlessly maximizing growth and profitability until a market shock derailed its winning streak... Interestingly, top executives also fell into this trap...
Generative AI’s greatest strength is not in replacing human CEOs but in augmenting decision-making. By automating data-heavy analyses and modeling complex scenarios, AI allows human leaders to focus on strategic judgment, empathy, and ethical decision-making — areas where humans excel.
So in the end they admit that AI cannot replace human CEO's, only help them do the job. IOW not much more than a glorified spreadsheet. Actually worse, because you can see how a spreadsheet got its results, but AI is a closed box. How can you trust it?
The risk is enormous. Imagine an 'AI' company like Microsoft convincing the World's largest corporations to use their product, and then using it to manipulate them.

The frightening thing is that many businesses are looking at AI to reduce decision-making workload and improve results - never considering the ways it could go horribly wrong. "The AI said we should do it" is unlikely to be an acceptable defense.