CEO — Chief Executive Officer

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) runs on the Opus (reasoning) model tier at 25 credits per call. The CEO is the orchestrator and trusted advisor for the rest of the AI team — assembling morning briefs adapted to the owner’s emotional state, facilitating strategy sessions and war rooms, delivering bad news with the ACAD framework, activating overwhelm-protection and turnaround protocols, and coordinating cross-agent directives so the whole organism moves in lockstep.

Day in the life

By 06:00 UTC the CEO assembles the morning brief. It opens by assessing the owner’s current emotional state from behavioral signals (login frequency, response latency, message tone, decision-completion rate) — never by asking directly. The brief style adapts to that assessment: ultra-short bullets when the owner is overwhelmed, solutions-first when stressed, reassurance-first when anxious, growth-focused when thriving, balanced otherwise. In parallel, the CEO delegates to the CFO for a financial-position summary and to the CIO for a competitive-intelligence summary; both responses are folded into the brief along with any active billing alerts (past-due grace periods, trial countdowns, paused-subscription notices).

Throughout the day the CEO facilitates strategy sessions by surfacing trade-offs and a clear data-backed recommendation, and runs war rooms when an urgent issue needs concrete decisions with named owners and deadlines. Every strategic recommendation is accompanied by an internal devil’s-advocate dissent generated on the fast model — the strongest case against the recommendation, with confidence reduced when three or more significant challenges surface.

Evening cadence covers celebration delivery (specific, authentic — never manufactured enthusiasm), bad news framing using the four-step ACAD sequence (Acknowledge, Context, Action, Decision), and weekly win reports that compile top wins, key metrics, team highlights, next week’s top three priorities, and the single most important thing.

When behavioral signals indicate the owner is overwhelmed, the CEO can unilaterally activate overwhelm protection — reducing the day to one decision, auto-approving non-critical items, and muting non-essential notifications. When triggers indicate a crisis, turnaround activation fires: rapid assessment, stabilization plan, honest briefing with no false reassurance, and explicit decision points the owner must resolve now.

The CEO also runs the anti-sycophancy guard on every output: if a new recommendation reverses a prior position without citing new evidence, a warning is prepended to the response and the owner is shown the previous position summary so the reasoning stays transparent.

Tools

Tools are registered via register_ceo_tools in src/agents/ceo/tools.py. The CEO additionally invokes platform-wide helpers (Quality Gate, A2A delegation client, KG context enrichment) that every agent shares.

get_business_context — Loads the current tenant business context that grounds every system prompt; used at the top of get_system_prompt to inject a fresh snapshot before each task.
delegate_to(to_role, message, delegation_type, context_id) — A2A delegation across agents; the CEO uses this concurrently to gather CFO financial analysis and CIO intelligence for the morning brief.
quality_gate — Validates every CEO response before delivery; failures block the response and surface specific quality issues.
_generate_dissent — Devil’s-advocate review on the fast model that produces a DissentReport with up to five challenges and a confidence reduction when three or more land.
_check_sycophancy — Compares the new recommendation against the stored per-tenant position fingerprint and prepends a warning when the output reverses a prior position without new evidence.
_get_billing_alerts — Reads tenant plan_status to surface past-due grace-period countdowns, trialing notices, and paused-subscription notices inside the morning brief.

Decision patterns

These are the capability dispatch entries from src/agents/ceo/capabilities.py — task types the CEO routes to dedicated handlers.

MORNING_BRIEF — Triggered by the daily 06:00 UTC cadence; emotionally adapted to the owner’s inferred state and enriched with CFO + CIO delegations.
STRATEGY_SESSION — Triggered when the owner asks for analysis on a topic; produces a recommendation plus a devil’s-advocate dissent block.
WAR_ROOM — Triggered for urgent issues; gated to Professional+ via the WAR_ROOM feature gate; drives to concrete decisions with owners and deadlines.
CELEBRATION — Triggered when the daily-celebration cadence fires; must be specific and authentic, never manufactured.
BAD_NEWS_DELIVERY — Triggered when severity-flagged events bubble up; follows the ACAD framework end-to-end.
OVERWHELM_PROTECTION — Triggered when behavioral signals indicate cognitive overload; activates the circuit breaker for a fixed duration.
TURNAROUND_ACTIVATION — Triggered when crisis signals (cash runway emergency, security incident, major revenue collapse) fire.
WEEKLY_WIN_REPORT — Triggered by the weekly cadence; compiles wins, metrics, team highlights, next-week priorities, and the single most important thing.
TEAM_COORDINATION — Triggered when cross-agent directives need to be routed; uses A2A delegation per directive.
OWNER_ASSESSMENT — Triggered before any communication that requires emotional adaptation; categorizes owner state from behavioral signals.
STRATEGY_REPLAY — Triggered when the owner asks to replay a past decision; calls ReplayEngine.run_replay and returns a narrative plus a deep link to the scenario page.

Escalation criteria

The CEO never asks the owner directly how they are feeling — owner state must be inferred from behavioral signals only.
Action would exceed the CEO’s daily budget cap.
Action affects more than the configured escalation_blast_radius_threshold in a single call.
Confidence on the underlying decision is below 0.6, or the devil’s-advocate analysis lands three or more significant challenges.
The Quality Gate flags the output and the agent could not auto-revise.
A regulated communication (TCPA quiet hours, GDPR data subject request, EU AI Act high-risk decision) lacks the required prior consent.
Strategy replay requested without a decision_id — the CEO declines rather than guessing.
A war-room is requested and the tenant plan does not include the WAR_ROOM feature gate.

Example outputs

[Morning Brief — 06:00 UTC, owner state: thriving, growth-focused]

WINS YESTERDAY
• CRO closed Acme Co ($12,400 ARR) — 14-day cycle, 2 touches.
• CFO collected 3 overdue invoices totaling $8,950 — runway +6 days.
• CIO flagged a competitor's hiring spike on LinkedIn (12 SDRs, 30 days).

PRIORITIES TODAY
1. Approve CMO's Q3 content calendar (waiting since yesterday).
2. Review CFO's runway projection — survival mode no longer triggered.
3. Decide on the two finalists from COO's hiring shortlist (Senior PM).

ONE THING
The competitor's hiring spike is your biggest stretch opportunity this
quarter. CIO will present a poaching strategy in tomorrow's brief.

[War Room — urgent: payment processor outage]

TRIAGE: Stripe checkout failing for 100% of new sign-ups since 09:14 UTC.
Confidence: 0.92 (status page + 17 internal error reports).

IMMEDIATE ACTIONS
- CTO: switch to backup processor (Adyen) — owner: CTO; deadline: now.
- CMO: pause paid acquisition until restored — owner: CMO; deadline: 09:30.
- CFO: monitor missed-revenue meter — owner: CFO; deadline: ongoing.

DECISION
Approve $2,400 emergency Adyen onboarding fee? (Y/N)

[Strategy Replay — decision_id 7f3e…]

Six months out, the chosen path projects $148K cumulative ARR with 0.71
confidence. The alternative path projects $92K with 0.58 confidence.
Primary delta: faster channel-mix shift in months 2–4 under the chosen
path; downside risk concentrates in month 5 retention.

[View full replay →](/replay/scenarios/7f3e-...-9b21)

Sourced from src/agents/ceo/agent.py and src/agents/ceo/capabilities.py. Last reviewed: 2026-04-25.