What is AI CEO?

Open-source orchestration for zero-human companies

If OpenClaw is an employee, AI CEO is the company

AI CEO is a Node.js server and React UI that orchestrates a team of AI agents to run a business. Bring your own agents, assign goals, and track your agents' work and costs from one dashboard.

It looks like a task manager — but under the hood it has org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment, and agent coordination.

Manage business goals, not pull requests.

| | Step | Example | | ------ | --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ | | 01 | Define the goal | "Build the #1 AI note-taking app to $1M MRR." | | 02 | Hire the team | CEO, CTO, engineers, designers, marketers — any bot, any provider. | | 03 | Approve and run | Review strategy. Set budgets. Hit go. Monitor from the dashboard. |

COMING SOON: Clipmart — Download and run entire companies with one click. Browse pre-built company templates — full org structures, agent configs, and skills — and import them into your AI CEO instance in seconds.

If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

AI CEO is right for you if

• ✅ You want to build autonomous AI companies
• ✅ You coordinate many different agents (OpenClaw, Codex, Claude, Cursor) toward a common goal
• ✅ You have 20 simultaneous Claude Code terminals open and lose track of what everyone is doing
• ✅ You want agents running autonomously 24/7, but still want to audit work and chime in when needed
• ✅ You want to monitor costs and enforce budgets
• ✅ You want a process for managing agents that feels like using a task manager
• ✅ You want to manage your autonomous businesses from your phone

Features

Problems AI CEO solves

| Without AI CEO | With AI CEO | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ❌ You have 20 Claude Code tabs open and can't track which one does what. On reboot you lose everything. | ✅ Tasks are ticket-based, conversations are threaded, sessions persist across reboots. | | ❌ You manually gather context from several places to remind your bot what you're actually doing. | ✅ Context flows from the task up through the project and company goals — your agent always knows what to do and why. | | ❌ Folders of agent configs are disorganized and you're re-inventing task management, communication, and coordination between agents. | ✅ AI CEO gives you org charts, ticketing, delegation, and governance out of the box — so you run a company, not a pile of scripts. | | ❌ Runaway loops waste hundreds of dollars of tokens and max your quota before you even know what happened. | ✅ Cost tracking surfaces token budgets and throttles agents when they're out. Management prioritizes with budgets. | | ❌ You have recurring jobs (customer support, social, reports) and have to remember to manually kick them off. | ✅ Heartbeats handle regular work on a schedule. Management supervises. | | ❌ You have an idea, you have to find your repo, fire up Claude Code, keep a tab open, and babysit it. | ✅ Add a task in AI CEO. Your coding agent works on it until it's done. Management reviews their work. |

Why AI CEO is special

AI CEO handles the hard orchestration details correctly.

| | | | --------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Atomic execution. | Task checkout and budget enforcement are atomic, so no double-work and no runaway spend. | | Persistent agent state. | Agents resume the same task context across heartbeats instead of restarting from scratch. | | Runtime skill injection. | Agents can learn AI CEO workflows and project context at runtime, without retraining. | | Governance with rollback. | Approval gates are enforced, config changes are revisioned, and bad changes can be rolled back safely. | | Goal-aware execution. | Tasks carry full goal ancestry so agents consistently see the "why," not just a title. | | Portable company templates. | Export/import orgs, agents, and skills with secret scrubbing and collision handling. | | True multi-company isolation. | Every entity is company-scoped, so one deployment can run many companies with separate data and audit trails. |

What AI CEO is not

| | | | ---------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Not a chatbot. | Agents have jobs, not chat windows. | | Not an agent framework. | We don't tell you how to build agents. We tell you how to run a company made of them. | | Not a workflow builder. | No drag-and-drop pipelines. AI CEO models companies — with org charts, goals, budgets, and governance. | | Not a prompt manager. | Agents bring their own prompts, models, and runtimes. AI CEO manages the organization they work in. | | Not a single-agent tool. | This is for teams. If you have one agent, you probably don't need AI CEO. If you have twenty — you definitely do. | | Not a code review tool. | AI CEO orchestrates work, not pull requests. Bring your own review process. |

Quickstart

Open source. Self-hosted. No AI CEO account required.

npx ai-ceo onboard --yes

If you already have AI CEO configured, rerunning onboard keeps the existing config in place. Use ai-ceo configure to edit settings.

Or manually:

git clone https://github.com/Helsinki-Code/ai-ceo.git
cd paperclip
pnpm install
pnpm dev

This starts the API server at http://localhost:3100. An embedded PostgreSQL database is created automatically — no setup required.

Requirements: Node.js 20+, pnpm 9.15+

FAQ

What does a typical setup look like? Locally, a single Node.js process manages an embedded Postgres and local file storage. For production, point it at your own Postgres and deploy however you like. Configure projects, agents, and goals — the agents take care of the rest.

If you're a solo-entreprenuer you can use Tailscale to access AI CEO on the go. Then later you can deploy to e.g. Vercel when you need it.

Can I run multiple companies? Yes. A single deployment can run an unlimited number of companies with complete data isolation.

How is AI CEO different from agents like OpenClaw or Claude Code? AI CEO uses those agents. It orchestrates them into a company — with org charts, budgets, goals, governance, and accountability.

Why should I use AI CEO instead of just pointing my OpenClaw to Asana or Trello? Agent orchestration has subtleties in how you coordinate who has work checked out, how to maintain sessions, monitoring costs, establishing governance - AI CEO does this for you.

(Bring-your-own-ticket-system is on the Roadmap)

Do agents run continuously? By default, agents run on scheduled heartbeats and event-based triggers (task assignment, @-mentions). You can also hook in continuous agents like OpenClaw. You bring your agent and AI CEO coordinates.

Development

pnpm dev              # Full dev (API + UI, watch mode)
pnpm dev:once         # Full dev without file watching
pnpm dev:server       # Server only
pnpm build            # Build all
pnpm typecheck        # Type checking
pnpm test:run         # Run tests
pnpm db:generate      # Generate DB migration
pnpm db:migrate       # Apply migrations

See doc/DEVELOPING.md for the full development guide.

Roadmap

• ✅ Plugin system (e.g. add a knowledge base, custom tracing, queues, etc)
• ✅ Get OpenClaw / claw-style agent employees
• ✅ companies.sh - import and export entire organizations
• ✅ Easy AGENTS.md configurations
• ✅ Skills Manager
• ✅ Scheduled Routines
• ✅ Better Budgeting
• ⚪ Artifacts & Deployments
• ⚪ CEO Chat
• ⚪ MAXIMIZER MODE
• ⚪ Multiple Human Users
• ⚪ Cloud / Sandbox agents (e.g. Cursor / e2b agents)
• ⚪ Cloud deployments
• ⚪ Desktop App

Community & Plugins

Find Plugins and more at awesome-paperclip

Contributing

We welcome contributions. See the contributing guide for details.

Community

• Discord — Join the community
• GitHub Issues — bugs and feature requests
• GitHub Discussions — ideas and RFC

License

MIT © 2026 AI CEO

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