GoDaddy's CEO Won't Read Reports He Suspects AI Wrote

GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani has a blunt policy for documents he suspects came out of a chatbot: he doesn't read them. He told Business Insider that AI-generated writing gives itself away fast, and when it does, the report goes straight back to the pile.

"If somebody sends me a document and I can tell pretty quickly it was written by AI, I don't read it," he said. "If the person couldn't take the time to write it, then I definitely shouldn't take the time to read it."

How does he spot AI writing?

Bhutani's detection method is low-tech and, he says, reliable. The telltale signs he watches for are:

• excessive length,
• an overly punchy tone,
• language that is a little too perfect.

The point isn't aesthetic preference. His goal is making sure his employees think for themselves rather than delegating that work to a model trained on public data.

"AI only knows what the internet already knows," he said. "It doesn't know what we know deep inside us, and there are ideas coming from us all the time."

Why writing itself matters to him

Bhutani argues that conveying an idea clearly in writing forces you to refine the idea — a process he calls "the art of iteration." When he reads an employee's work, the machinery behind it matters more than the polish on top.

"What I'm really looking for is: What was the original observation? What was the original hypothesis? What got you interested in this idea? Why do you think it matters?" he said.

Those questions can't be answered by a summarization engine. They live in the head of the person who did the thinking, which is precisely why he wants the writing to come from there too.

Are other executives drawing the same line?

Bhutani is far from alone in treating writing as a core workplace skill rather than a chore that AI can absorb.

Zapier CEO Wade Foster has described what he calls "the comprehension gap" — the situation that emerges when executives use AI to craft their communications and later can't explain the work those messages were supposed to represent.

Sam Altman has framed the same idea from the opposite direction, calling writing "externalized thinking." Putting a difficult problem into words, he has said, helps him clarify his own ideas about it.

Publishing executive JD Barker recently made the case in Fast Company that writing exposes weak reasoning before anyone else finds it. "When someone sits down to explain a decision in plain language, they run into every soft spot in their reasoning," he wrote. "A manager who can write a clear one-page memo can usually think clearly about the problem in it."

What does this mean for workplace norms?

The pattern across these executives points to a growing split between output and understanding. As AI makes polished prose cheaper to produce, the people who approve budgets and sign off on decisions appear to be pricing that polish at zero — and looking for the thinking underneath instead.

Bhutani's unread-report rule may be the bluntest version of that shift so far, and it's a signal knowledge workers can expect more leaders to test whether the words on the page were earned the slow way.