A tech startup called Skyfall AI is set to do the most tech startup thing imaginable: toy with an unwitting group of employees’ careers by turning their company into a giant AI experiment.
First, the plan is to buy a small tech business, like an e-commerce or B2B SaaS company, for as much as $1 million. Then the shotcallers at Skyfall will appoint an AI as the CEO, put it in charge of running the entire operation, and dust off their hands while wishing the employees they just subjugated to an AI model all the best.
Skyfall’s human CEO and cofounder Sam Pasupalak frames this as key to realizing the company’s mission to “democratize the power of a CEO to all the small businesses around the world.”
“If you want a truly autonomous business, you have to buy a business and operate the whole thing end to end,” Pasupalak told Forbes in an interview. “Unless you run a business with minimal human intervention, you’ll never know whether an autonomous enterprise is actually possible.”
Unlike many AI firms that’re focused on building AI agents that perform specific workers’ tasks, including sales and coding, Skyfall wants to set itself apart by pursuing a virtual CEO that can help with the big picture decision-making needed to run a company.
The AI model will have plenty of responsibilities, like overseeing pricing, marketing, customer support, finance, and operations, according to Forbes. The goal? Gradually reduce human involvement, all while doubling the company’s revenue.
That’s an ambitious goal. But the SkyFall guys are confident that their AI is ready for the real world after an unusual test: it excelled at the video game RollerCoaster Tycoon, a management sim where you oversee an amusement park. Good enough, right?
“That gave us confidence that we could operate inside a simulated business. The next step is buying a real company,” Pasupalak said.
They’re not prepared to let an AI completely run loose, though, stressing that even when AI hypothetically takes over a lot of a company’s operations, humans should still provide accountability.
“Trust is still important, and you probably don’t want to relinquish actual responsibility to an AI,” chief technology officer Kaheer Suleman told Forbes. “Humans should always remain responsible in some capacity.”
Skyfall is arguably realizing an idea some tech CEOs are already playing with. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly training a “CEO AI agent” to help him do his job, as well as creating a virtual AI clone of the millennial founder so he can be omnipresent through the company. And Block’s Jack Dorsey recently revealed his vision to create a management hierarchy in which everyone in his company reports to him through a central AI — what he styled as the “intelligence layer.”
All those examples illustrate a disturbing trend: CEOs can tout AI’s supposedly wondrous ability to streamline operations all they want, but it’s clear the tech is being used to extend their authority over the rank and file. If they can’t literally be everywhere at once, their all-seeing AI systems can.
Skyfall’s wouldn’t be the first stunt involving AI running a business. Researchers at Andon Labs put a Google Gemini-powered AI model in charge of running an entire coffee shop in Stockholm, which proceeded to blow through most of its budget in a single month. The AI safety firm also let Anthropic’s Claude run a vending machine, allowing it to set prices and choose what to stock. It quickly devolved into chaos after taking employee requests and splurging on bizarre items like tungsten cubes.
Let’s hope for the sake of the employees that Skyfall’s experiment fares a little better. Or maybe not, if it paves the way to a world where AI runs everything.
“We want all businesses to be run autonomously because we believe people should spend their time on things they’re passionate about — not operational tasks,” Pasupalak told Forbes. “We want to build the autonomous era.”
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