A Company Could Run Itself Around a Bot Because a CEO Is Just a Router

Amjad Masad, the chief executive of Replit, was describing his idea for the "self-driving company," a company that largely runs itself. He described engineers who "only look at the code when it's about to get deployed."

Then he offered his theory of management. "A CEO is a kind of glorified router," Masad said. Much of what he does, he argued, is moving information from one person to another, making sure this person talks to that person, and that kind of routing should be done by software.

At Replit, he said, that software is an internal bot that has become "the brain of the company." Any employee can ask it about the business, the metrics, or where the business is headed.

The company calls the layer a "self-driving data semantic layer" in a blog post, and it connects and makes sense of the different data sources. When an employee asks a question, Masad said, it draws on company Notion pages, the Postgres database that stores structured business data, and the code base, and synthesizes them into a report.

The point, Masad argued, is to eliminate hierarchy as a mechanism for routing information. Masad said, "I think you get to a point where the company looks less like a hierarchy and more like a network, like an open-source project of sorts." These are his claims about his own company, which have not been independently verified.

He pointed to what he said has already changed inside his firm. According to Masad, Replit has canceled or downsized most of its contracts with outside analytics vendors and replaced them with software its own staff created, a claim that has not been checked independently. He said he was not quite ready to name the vendors, saying he sympathized with them.