Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo, just sent a memo to his entire company. He didn’t sugarcoat it. AppSumo had a brutal year, lost teammates, lost revenue, and lost some of the joy. He owned it. Then he said something most CEOs write around in seventeen layers of corporate softener:
“Replacing yourself SHOULD be the goal. Not the threat.”
Read that again.
The CEO of a company that just went through layoffs, in the middle of an AI anxiety spiral across every industry, told his people: hand more off to AI.
The faster you do it, the faster you get to do what only you can. It’s the clearest articulation of what AI-era leadership actually looks like.
The fear is backwards
Most people inside organizations right now are playing defense. They’re making themselves look busy. They’re hoarding tasks. They’re performing complexity because complexity feels like job security. And, they’re also avoiding AI.
It isn’t.
The people who are irreplaceable in an AI-accelerated org aren’t the ones who do the most tasks. They’re the ones who’ve figured out which tasks matter and handed everything else off so they can go find the problems no one has named yet.
The fear of being replaced by AI is real. But it’s aimed at the wrong target.
You’re not going to get replaced by AI. You’re going to get replaced by someone who uses AI better than you, someone who figured out that the goal was never to do more, it was to move up.
The best money I’ve ever seen a CEO spend
Here’s what I’ve noticed working with executives who are actually winning with AI right now: they are obsessive about finding people who are addicted to making an impact, because they want the next problem. And, they’re using AI to optimize efficiency so they can take on bigger challenges.
They’re not looking for AI-literate employees. They’re looking for AI-leveraged ones. People who wake up thinking about what they can hand off today so they can attack something bigger tomorrow. That distinction matters. Literacy means you know the tools. Leverage means you’ve redesigned your entire workflow around them, and you’re already looking at what comes next.
These people are underrated. Criminally underrated. Most hiring managers are still evaluating for task execution when they should be evaluating for task elimination.
What Noah got right, and what most leaders won’t say
The memo is worth reading in full. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s honest in a rare way. He acknowledges AI is eating the world. He doesn’t pretend otherwise. But then he reframes the whole thing: the people who thrive are the ones who figure out how to offload the repetitive work to AI so they can build more valuable things.
That’s the expansion frame. Not AI as a cost-cutting mechanism, but AI as a capability multiplier. Not extraction, expansion.
Most leaders won’t say this out loud because it requires them to admit two uncomfortable things simultaneously: AI is changing the org, and the people who adapt fastest are the ones you want to keep.
Saying that requires courage. Not just from the CEO, from every person in the org who has to look at their own workflow and ask: what am I holding onto that I should be handing off?
The replacement test
Here’s a simple frame I use with clients:
If you couldn’t be in your current role for six months, could your AI systems and documented workflows carry most of your current responsibilities? If the answer is no, you’re not building leverage. You’re just working harder inside a system that hasn’t changed.
The goal isn’t to make yourself disposable. The goal is to make your current level of problem disposable, so you can move up to the ones that actually need you.
The best operators I’ve worked with are constantly trying to replace themselves at their current level. Not because they’re afraid of what’s coming, but because they’re ambitious about where they’re going. That’s the character test. Are you defending your current role or designing your next one?
For the leaders reading this
If you’re running a team right now, the signal you want to watch for isn’t who’s working the hardest. It’s who’s eliminating work the fastest. The person who ships the same output in half the time because they rebuilt their workflow around AI isn’t a threat to headcount. They’re your proof of concept.
The ones who should concern you are the ones doing everything the same way they did two years ago, because they think the way to stay safe is to stay invisible. That’s not safe. That’s slow.
Noah’s memo isn’t about AI anxiety. It’s about what kind of company AppSumo is going to be on the other side of this transition. He’s betting on the builders, the people who see a broken thing and fix it, who see an opportunity and create it. That’s the only bet worth making.
Replace yourself. Move up. Repeat.
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