If you love your boss, imagine how much more you'll love their AI twin

Summary

Imagine that your boss is too busy to show up at that meeting you called so she sends a bot of herself instead. With a digital twin, even your company's CEO - the one who spends all his time on the corporate jet - could make an appearance at your powwow about the break room coffee machine. But would you want them there? Computer scientists have started to explore the possibility of AI bots that resemble actual corporate leaders in voice and/or appearance, based on the belief that managerial avatars might be tolerated or even worthwhile. One group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Emory have now published their findings in a pre-print paper titled, "When Your Boss Is an AI Bot: Exploring Opportunities and Risks of Manager Clone Agents in the Future Workplace," scheduled to be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Barcelona next month. To justify their study, the authors point to a handful of reports of bosses already "cloning themselves," by having a digital twin attend a conference call, for example. They also note, "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (NVIDIA, 2022) and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (HeyGen, 2024) have released their AI avatars in public, while companies like Zoom (Peters, 2025) and Otter.ai (Boyle, 2025) pilot digital stand-ins for meetings and briefings." After interviewing 23 managers and workers about speculative scenarios where manager clone agents might be useful, they've come up with several possible roles that might work – with some caveats. "Our findings reveal a fundamental tension between the promise and risks of manager clone agents," the researchers report in the paper. "On the one hand, participants envisioned supportive roles, acting as proxy presences in meetings, conveying information across organizational layers, automating routine tasks, and amplifying managerial guidance." At the same time, they say, delegating these roles to software creates risks. For one, managers and workers expressed anxiet...