After Zuckerberg, every CEO could have an AI deputy
Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a personal AI agent to shoulder some of his executive duties and so he can get more done in a day. One entrepreneur predicts this is just the beginning, and that within three years, a third of every CEO’s workload will be offloaded to AI.
CEOs will outsource a third of their workloads to AI CEOs by 2028, claims AI entrepreneur and CEO, John Margerison. He also warns that ‘regulatory discomfort’ and over-reliance on in-house development teams will be the two biggest barriers to AI adoption.
While interest is accelerating, there is very little clarity as to how AI will reshape leadership roles in practice. Margerison believes CEOs will increasingly hand off time-consuming operational work to AI, allowing them to focus on setting their organisational vision, leading strategic change, and engaging with teams and key stakeholders face to face.
But this isn’t much of a surprise, with a recent study finding that UK business leaders have become increasingly reliant on AI to make key decisions. The ‘Quick Thinking 2026, report found that 62% of executives using AI to make the majority of decisions, and four in five (79%) admitting to trusting AI to support them in making complex decisions.
Speed is key in the current environment. The study found that 92% of business leaders believe the speed of making decisions has increased over the last three years, compared to 83% just a year ago. However, with this pace of change, 60% of leaders feel they have less time to make decisions, as expectations of their employees are rising.
“There is a growing realisation that the CEO role is set to change in very deep ways. That shift will transform not just the CEO’s role, but the day-to-day work for the wider C-suite as well,” said John Margerison, CEO, XFactorAi. “Right now, a significant share of executive leadership time is spent on operational activity, such as analysing data, compiling reports, signing off routine actions, and handling other repeatable tasks. At least a third of this work will be outsourced to AI over the coming 18-to-24 months.”
Margerison believes that adoption will be slowed by a lack of trust in AI, especially when using AI systems developed outside of the business, impacting non-tech industries especially, as they will become dependant on inexperienced in-house tech teams that lack the capacity or capability to deploy these systems quickly.
However, there is a solution that is being seen in the industry already: “The solution is already starting to present itself in the financial data and M&A trends. That answer is buying that capability off the shelf through a strategic acquisition or exclusive licensing. We’ll see more of this over the coming months, which is likely to push AI M&A activity even higher in the second half of 2026.”
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