Every Employee Is Now a CEO: Rethinking Work, Leadership, and Ownership in the Age of AI

When Mordy Golding took the stage at Juno Journey’s Mastering the AI-Driven Skills Economy meetup in New York, he didn’t talk about disruption, automation, or even the future of learning.
Instead, he asked a more provocative question:
What happens when every employee can lead, not people, but technology itself?

His answer: Every employee becomes a CEO.

From Adobe to AI: The Evolution of a Learner

Golding’s journey is steeped in learning. After a successful career as a Product Manager at Adobe, he became one of the early pioneers of online learning, helping shape lynda.com before it became LinkedIn Learning.

He described those early days as “messy but magical,” a startup full of people obsessed with changing the future of education. “We were all doers,” he recalled. “Everyone had a list of what they were going to do to change the world, managing people just felt like a distraction.”

When LinkedIn acquired Lynda in 2015, everything shifted. For the first time, Golding had to choose between becoming a manager or staying an individual contributor.

LinkedIn’s culture, where “Talent is our number one operating priority,” reframed what leadership could mean. At LinkedIn, individual contributors could grow, earn, and lead just as much as managers. “That,” he said, “was revolutionary.”

The Microsoft Era: Scale, Growth, and the Birth of a New Mindset

When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn a year later, Golding witnessed another transformation — this time, cultural.

Under Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft evolved from “developer, developer, developer” to a company built on learning and growth mindset.

For Golding, this meant one thing: learning at scale.

With a small team that needed to double in size, he realized that the most important person in his professional life wasn’t another engineer — it was his HR business partner.

“Having that partnership changed my entire approach to leadership and learning,” he said. “You can’t scale without investing in people development, and that’s true whether you’re leading 50 humans or 50 AI agents.”

AI as a Team — Not a Tool

When ChatGPT launched in 2022, Golding’s reaction was… measured. “At LinkedIn, we’d been using AI for years,” he said. “Matching skills to jobs, personalizing learning — that was AI. What changed was the accessibility.”

But soon after Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI, the message across the organization was clear: Whatever you build next, it’s going to be AI-powered.

That directive unlocked something bigger for Golding. He began to see AI not as a tool that humans control, but as a team that humans lead.

“We shouldn’t think of AI like a calculator,” he explained. “A calculator performs a task. AI can make decisions. The intelligence is no longer just in the human, it’s in the system we build, train, and collaborate with.”

To illustrate, he told the story of Jacob Bank, founder of Relay.app, who built an entire “org chart” of AI agents, each responsible for specific business functions, from marketing to event strategy.

“They were making decisions on their own,” Golding said. “He didn’t have a CMO or an ops team — he built one out of code. That’s when it hit me: this is what hybrid work truly means. Humans and agents, side by side.”

Every Employee as a CEO

Golding’s central idea — that every employee is now a CEO — comes from observing this shift firsthand.

In the past, climbing the corporate ladder meant waiting for permission: a title, a promotion, a team.
Today, with AI, that permission structure is gone.

“You can build a team of 50 agents right now,” he said. “No approvals, no budget meetings. Just initiative. That makes you a CEO — not of people, but of capability.”

He describes this as Performance Management 2.0: the ability to lead systems, not just humans. And it requires the same skill set that great leaders have always had — clear direction, measurable outcomes, and emotional intelligence.

“If you can’t lead an AI agent,” he asked, “how will you lead a human?”

From Career Ladders to Skill Maps

Golding’s redefinition of work aligns closely with what many L&D leaders are already seeing: the shift from roles to skills.

At LinkedIn, he recalls CEO Ryan Roslansky framing it simply — jobs aren’t static titles anymore; they’re collections of tasks that evolve with technology.

That’s why, Golding argued, reskilling must start with unbundling work:

“What are the actual tasks you do? Which of those can AI do? Which require human judgment? Once you map that, you can start designing work that scales with you.”

This mindset, he said, frees people from the fear of obsolescence. The goal isn’t to protect a title — it’s to continuously expand your impact.

The New Leadership Equation

Golding ended his talk with a challenge, one that resonated deeply with every L&D and HR leader in the room:

“If the old career path was: ‘Get promoted, earn resources, grow your team,’
the new path is: ‘Build your agents, prove your capability, earn your impact.’”

The message was clear:
Leadership is no longer about how many people report to you.
It’s about how much value you can create, with the humans and machines that now work alongside you.

The Takeaway

In the AI-driven skills economy, leadership has been democratized.
Whether you manage a department or a single AI workflow, you have the power to design, direct, and deliver meaningful impact.

“Every employee is a CEO now,” Golding concluded.
“The only question is, what kind of company are you building?”