Can AI avatars ensure that a CEO has eyes and ears everywhere?

The digital twin of a leader should have well-established guardrails and transparency, traceability and accountability

Illustrations of video avatars created by Synthesia, an AI video platform. Reuters

Having an avatar has seemingly always been for those immersed in video games and social media. It was confined to fun and games, until now.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, chief executive of Klarna, and Zoom chief executive Eric Yuan recently made news when they sent their AI avatars to take their place at quarterly earnings meetings.

Better known as digital twins, these AI creations use data to build a visual representation of a real human being and mimic their speech and behaviour. In short, it is a virtual body double. Are business leaders finally getting to a point where they can be in two places (or more) at once?

The reason this is possible is the emergence of agentic AI systems that have memory and are self-controlled, contextually aware, and capable of aligning goals. Such AI agents do not simply carry out orders, but know why a decision was made, how organisational dynamics work, and when it is time to act or escalate.

Klarna chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski sent his AI clone to attend a quarterly meeting. Reuters

To CEOs, this means a strategic leverage unseen before: the ability to triage complexity, extend presence over geographies and functions as well as provide leadership continuity at a machine-speed.

The chief executive will be informed by their avatar, but we believe that the line will be drawn at decision making. Yes, the download that the CEO takes from their digital twin will be considered, but no true decision on the direction of a company, staffing, or choice of products or services can be made by an avatar.

This is where the CEO must insert themselves and deliver all decisions and messages as themselves, as a human.

Real-life implications of digital twins

The global digital twin market is estimated to reach $155.84 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research estimates. In fact, when speaking of advanced industries, about 75 per cent of them have already adopted some form of digital twin technology, a McKinsey study found.

The vast majority of this, however, is product simulations and service twins where companies can test and practice scenarios in controlled environments before going to market, not twins of actual humans.

The benefits range from faster development, safer products, and greater innovation, to cost savings and greater predictions of outcomes.

But, what about a human digital twin?

Zoom's chief executive Eric Yuan has been a long time AI proponent. AP

Before any technology is truly embraced, there must be a proof of concept. With the likes of Mr Siemiatkowski and Mr Yaun successfully using digital avatars (albeit in closed one-off internal meetings) the technology is likely to gain momentum across industries.

We already see people like Otter chief executive Sam Liang, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Khosla Ventures managing director Keith Rabois, all using AI digital twin avatars. The drive behind this? Time and availability.

In some cases, digital twins have already cut total development times by 20 per cent to 50 per cent, and resulted in 25 per cent less quality issues on entering production, according to the McKinsey report.

If these numbers stay true, or probably increase, there will be no stopping this technology from spreading across industries around the globe. When CEOs find that there is an increase in safety, production times are lessened, R&D time and expense goes down, and their profits go up from using digital twins, why would they not use digital twin technology?

As more and more leaders around the globe see this technology used successfully, they will follow suit with a digital version of themselves. They will decide what meetings they will need to attend and then send their digital self to the rest. There will be no more double booking or missed opportunities.

They can attend every meeting and have eyes and ears everywhere. They no longer have to rely on notes from someone else. The digital twin avatar will report back based on the data input it receives.

The ethical dilemma

As this technology spreads, we will begin to ask where the physical world ends and the digital world begins.

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Is there too much of a blur? Is it the moral responsibility of a leader to inform everyone before a meeting that an avatar will attend on their behalf? Consequently, will the people required to be in that meeting feel disrespected that the CEO did not physically show up? Leaders will need to struggle with this continuously.

The follow-up from a digital twin also raises ethical concerns. How do you ensure that inherent biases are accounted for? As a human you can read facial expressions, notice that someone spends a lot of the meeting off camera, or appears to be having side conversations while the meeting is taking place.

Will the avatar have these same instinctual observations and report back? As the technology evolves so will the demands put upon it by its human creators.

This new power a chief executive can harness will be accompanied with an additional dimension of ethical and fiduciary responsibility.

The digital twin of a CEO should have well-established guardrails and transparency, traceability and accountability of all the decisions that it might be involved in and influence.

Auditability of agentic actions and alignment to corporate governance practices should be guaranteed to the boards and shareholders, not black-box behaviours.

The ethical requirement is not simply to enable digital avatars, but to root them in human control, corporate responsibility and the interests of the business in the long term.

This technology will become commonplace throughout the corporate world. But it will be up to each individual leader to decide what responsibilities they abdicate to a machine and which they keep for themselves.

It will be interesting to see this evolution and monitor what becomes of businesses and the reputations of leaders that send digital twins to do their work.

Chetan Dube is the founder of Quant and Yousef Khalili is its global chief transformation officer and chief executive of MEA