My boss volunteered to be replaced

After months of AI-attributed layoffs, Business Insider editor Ryan Kailath offered himself up as a guinea pig. His reporter, an AI skeptic, took the assignment and built RyanBot.

“My boss had a proposal: It was time to replace him with AI.”

Why the clone was tempting

A bot boss has no meetings, no lunch breaks and no other reporters. It could read every line of a 100-page data report and hand back notes in seconds, at any hour.

Two manuals and a voice setting

They built it on ChatGPT's Codex, tuned to a pragmatic voice, and fed it two essay-length documents: who Ryan is, and how he thinks, assesses and gives feedback.

“encourage reporters to argue for their ideas if they believe in them”

The same pitch, twice

For four months, every pitch, message, question and draft went to both the man and the machine, and the answers got compared. Real Ryan recused himself from editing the resulting story.

What is a manager for

The experiment turned philosophical fast. Emily Campion, a management professor at the University of Iowa, said the test pushes back to first principles about the job itself.

“What is the goal of a manager in an organization?”

The bot could not say no

Real Ryan kills pitches and hands the work back. RyanBot praised the idea, then offered to rewrite the pitch, restructure the draft or write the interview questions itself.

“these tools are designed to be endlessly, almost nauseatingly helpful”

Flattery that got eerie

Told to lead with the positive, it opened every message by announcing what the reporter had gotten right. Say something was interesting and it agreed it was interesting, even when it wasn't.

No ear for a joke

On a story about New York commuters, the bot flattened a walking-here gag, then wrote a worse draft with no quotes. Asked if its version was boring, it agreed it was.

“New Yorkers, famously, are walking here. But just about 25% of them are driving too.”

Where it earned its keep

It dug into the code behind a commuting analysis and questioned the sample size. On a draft about the "Odyssey" ticket scramble, it moved a resale price figure earlier, the same call human Ryan made.

Blind to the org chart

The bot never met the coworkers. It had nothing to say about which editor to pitch a story to, or how to escalate a problem, because it had no map of the newsroom.

Pushback without the politics

In four months it rejected two ideas, both handed down from elsewhere in the newsroom. A model unbothered by hierarchy can question anything, but it cannot weigh who needs the story or why.

Forever in its first week

Other reports said the bot felt like Ryan on day one. Campion figures AI can handle rule-based chores like scheduling, not the judgment calls that make a manager worth having.

“long, probing responses and a lack of institutional knowledge”