Tech Leaders in The Age of AI: Fading

What Gets Replaced First by AI Isn't the Frontline - It's the Leader Before the practical work of writing code or preparing materials, it is the core work of leadership itself - synthesizing information, making decisions, crafting strategy - that turns out to be AI's natural strength. An author who has watched the frontier of technology for over thirty years confronts this uncomfortable paradox head-on. The author is no mere commentator but a practitioner - having stepped down as Japan Head of Build by McKinsey, he is now personally running a "solo-CEO-plus-AI" operation, commanding multiple AIs at once. This book is that insider's record of hard-won practical knowledge. From "how many people you manage" to "how many AIs you command" - a theory of leadership forged in the trenches of Japan's leading tech companies and global firms, from launching PlayStation to running the Japan operations of a foreign firm. Answering the question "So what remains?" - reframing AI not as a threat but as a "partner in creation," the book presents, through a "trinity of science, technology, and business thinking," a new vision of leadership emerging beyond the leader who is disappearing. In discussions of generative AI displacing jobs, the subject has so far always been the frontline worker. But gathering information for a meeting, weighing options, and rendering judgment >We are moving from an era in which leading a large organization was the mark of a leader, to an era of the "solo-CEO-plus-AI" (the AI solopreneur), in which a single executive commands multiple AIs as a "team." Rethinking what disappears from leadership and what remains is the starting point of this book. The note series that began in November 2025 has developed this problem through the lens of a "trinity of science, technology, and business thinking." The series has now been substantially expanded and restructured for publication as a book. On the concept of the "solo-CEO-plus-AI" (AI solopreneur), the author also speaks in his own words - as someone actually operating as an AI solopreneur - about its background, practical methods, and future outlook, in Nikkei BP's interview feature "Biz Voyage: Signposts to the Next Step."