The CEO Job, Split Into 5 Tasks: Which Are Still Yours?

Search for an AI executive and you will find confident scorecards. We are not adding another one, because we have not run a study and we have no paying customers to point at. What we can do is narrower and more useful: take the job apart, show which tasks our own agents actually run today, and be honest about which ones still need a person.

What the Job Actually Consists Of

Strip away the title, and an executive role in a small business is mostly five tasks:

Which of These Agents Run Today

The first four are scheduled work, and scheduled work is what our agents are built for. In our own operation the agent team runs publishing, follow-up, reporting and monitoring on a daily cadence: a brief is assembled without anyone asking for it, articles and social posts go out on a schedule, invoices and receivables are watched, and anything that needs a decision is escalated rather than sitting quietly. The current state of that operation — agents online, containers, tasks completed, compute spend — is public at zerocorp.live/live, and the failure log is published there too.

Which of These Stay With a Person

The fifth one — and it should. Money, contracts, hiring, partnerships and anything resting on trust stay with the owner. Agents prepare; the owner decides. This is the part most AI-executive content skips, and it is the part that makes the model usable: you are not handing over accountability, you are handing over repetition.

The Two Shapes of Cost

There are two honest ways to add executive capacity. One is a hire: salary, roughly 30% in loadings for payroll tax, benefits and equipment, plus recruiting, onboarding, management time and eventual turnover. The other is a subscription: ZeroCorp plans run from $29/month for one agent role to $290/month for a seven-agent team, with no recruiting round and no management layer. Our calculator puts your own numbers side by side — the salary line moves enormously by country, so use yours rather than ours.

Where Agents Are Still Weak

Vision, negotiation, reading a room, and trust built over years. An agent can draft the proposal, but somebody still has to be the person the client calls. If your business runs on relationships, that part does not automate — and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

How to Test This Without Betting the Business

Start with the task that costs the most hours — usually follow-up or reporting — put one agent on it, and review its output daily for a week. If the work is genuinely routine, it will look routine by Friday. If it needs your judgment every single day, you have learned something cheap. Then decide about the next function.