The Last CEO
What happens when AI reaches the corner office?
The Last CEO
AI Salon Q1 2026 · 27. März · Funkhaus Wien
Unterstützt von der Fachgruppe UBIT der Wirtschaftskammer Wien
The Provocation
What if AI doesn’t replace the assembly line — but the corner office?
A CEO costs €300K+. What do they actually do? Make decisions based on dashboards, quarterly reports, market data. Pattern-matching at the highest salary level. Exactly what AI is demonstrably best at.
Recent data from the Anthropic Economic Index (March 2025) confirms it: AI’s greatest productivity gains are in high-skill, high-education tasks — a 12× speedup on college-level work vs. 9× on simpler tasks. The AI revolution doesn’t eat from the bottom up. It eats from the top down.
“The Last CEO” asks the question: If AI makes strategic decisions faster, cheaper, and more data-driven — what’s left for the humans in the C-suite?
Bridge from Meetup 1
At the last AI Salon, our artists showed us: When everyone has the same tools, taste wins. Tonight we ask the same question — one floor up. When the CEO has the same AI tools as everyone else — what makes them the CEO?
The Answer (That We'll Find Together)
The thesis is deliberately overstated. The honest answer is more complex: vision, culture, holding trust through crisis, stakeholder relationships — these are CEO functions that AI can’t perform. The evening explores the grey zone in between: Which leadership skills survive AI — and which don’t?
The Creative Dimension
If AI automates the analytical side of leadership — the dashboards, the pattern-matching, the data-driven decisions — what remains is taste, creative judgement, and the ability to make meaning from noise. The CEO who survives isn't the best analyst. It's the one who sees what the data doesn't show.
This is the AI Salon’s core thesis applied to leadership: In the age of AI, the creative mind isn’t a luxury — it’s the last competitive advantage.
Programm
- 18:30 — Doors & Arrival
- 19:00 — Opening & Welcome — Andreas Fraunberger (AI Austria), Can Nuri (Funkhaus Wien), Michael Raab (UBIT Wien)
- 19:10 — Keynote Conversation: Leadership in the Age of AI — Betina Kitzler (MIT Sloan Fellow) × Andreas Fraunberger
- 19:45 — Artistic Intervention — Sarah Rechberger, moderiert von Patrick Schabus
- 20:00 — Think Tank — Gruppenarbeit zu Führung im Zeitalter der KI
- 20:25 — Lightning Presentations — Jede Gruppe präsentiert in 2 Min.
- 20:35 — Wrap-up & Outlook
- 20:45 — Afterparty & Networking im Funkhaus
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