AI fears – A CEO’s AI project stalls inside a successful company, leading to a broader argument: many fears about AI mirror the fears of putting powerful optimization tools into organizations whose incentives and ethos already lean toward extraction rather than human flo
A multibillion-dollar company gets excited about a new AI product. Customers love it. The CEO personally tested it, watched it work, and then handed it to the team to commercialize and scale.
Six months later, the same product is going nowhere.
The sales team isn’t selling it. Developers are loath to work on it. Marketing won’t promote it. In meetings. executives insist the AI effort is part of their quarterly priorities. and each tells their teams to focus on the work. Yet line employees and middle managers keep finding ways to avoid the initiative.
When the CEO steps in, the results don’t change. He can get individual customers to adopt the product—but he can’t get his own people to do the same. even after investing extensively in training. performance bonuses. and top-down directives. He couldn’t identify a single person or group actively blocking the AI effort. So he replaced several key executives with new ones chosen for their enthusiasm for the direction.
Still, the uneasy status quo prevailed.
The CEO described the stress of that contradiction as something closer to being torn between two authorities—except. he couldn’t name the second one. “You know what’s driving me crazy?. I founded this company fifteen years ago,” he said. “When I first proposed the core idea, everyone thought I was nuts. Investors, potential employees, even my family.”.
Now that the company is successful, he said, the same type of people who once dismissed him resist when he proposes a pivot. “Now that we’re successful, when I suggest we need to pivot, many of the same people, including my own leadership team, resist because ‘we can’t risk what we’ve built.’”
He threw up his hands: “They’re protecting something that exists only because I took the ‘crazy’ risk they all thought was impossible. Now they think I’m reckless and can’t seem to appreciate how many times they’ve benefited from my pushing through the impossible to get us to new success.”
In the CEO’s bewilderment sits a question that a different kind of story already asked. In The Grapes of Wrath, tenant farmers are being evicted during the Dust Bowl. When they confront the men carrying out the evictions. they can’t get a clear answer about who is making the decision to devastate them. The men sent to do the dirty work answer to a bank manager. who answers to distant owners. and those owners answer to shareholders. Each has a role in the organization, but none seems to be in charge.
Steinbeck frames the farmers’ bafflement as the question: “Who is the bank?”
The bank becomes “the monster. Men made it. but they can’t control it.” And that same bewilderment—resistance without a clear blocker—appears in the CEO’s experience. He wasn’t fighting his own people on the AI initiative. He was grappling with what the story calls an emergent kind of living being: a force that develops its own character. preferences. and will.
In this telling. the CEO’s personal ethos of innovation was at war with the organization’s emergent character. which craved safety. certainty. and predictability. The fact that he personally championed innovation mattered very little. The organization’s behavior, the argument goes, can override the preferences of any individual within it—even the nominal leader.
The piece leans on an analogy to life itself. Living things maintain boundaries between themselves and their environment, metabolize resources, grow and adapt, and reproduce. They exhibit behaviors that emerge from parts but can’t be predicted by studying each part in isolation. Most importantly, they display “a will to survive” that shapes every action.
Organizations, the text says, exhibit the same kinds of properties. They maintain legal and cultural boundaries. metabolize capital. talent. and raw materials into products and services. grow through hiring and adaptation. and spawn subsidiaries or merge with others. Culture emerges from thousands of daily interactions that no employee handbook or org chart can fully capture. And when threatened, organizations show tenacity that can override individual preferences.
Each organization, in this view, is a superorganism. And that reframes the question “Who is the bank?”
The answer becomes direct: the bank is an emergent intelligence—a superorganism. That is the same structure behind the argument that many fears about AI are, at their core, fears about capitalism and the institutions already built to optimize for something specific.
When the story describes horror scenarios—AI systems optimizing ruthlessly toward a narrow goal while remaining blind to human costs—it’s described as a description of “the bank.” Men made it. but they can’t control it. And the fears about AI, as writer Ted Chiang is quoted as saying, are “often fears about capitalism.”.
The excerpt closes with a practical shift in how to think about outcomes: it argues that it’s not enough to ask what machines are optimizing for. To get different results. organizations must be questioned for the same thing—what they are optimizing for. and what their ethos is when power is poured into them.
Excerpted from Incorruptible by Eric Ries, published by Authors Equity. Copyright © 2026 by Eric Ries. Reprinted by permission of Authors Equity.
AI capitalism organizational culture incentives Eric Ries Ted Chiang The Grapes of Wrath superorganism corporate governance