Macbeth Today: Ambition, AI Predictions and the Making of a Corporate Tyrant

What If Macbeth Let an Algorithm Tell Him He Should Be Boss?

The Dashboard Says He Could Run the Company

Macbeth opens a confidential succession report and sees his name at the top. An artificial intelligence system has assessed the leadership team. It identifies him as the strongest potential successor to the chief executive. There are qualifications in the report, but his attention settles on the conclusion.

In a modern corporate retelling of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, that would be enough to start the trouble. A forecast gives an ambitious executive a future to imagine. He begins treating that future as something owed to him, then rearranges the organisation to obtain it. Each decision still belongs to him, however impressive the system looks.

This is an imagined adaptation and a reading of Shakespeare’s play, rather than an account of a real company or an existing AI product. Its succession model is a fictional device. The point is to test what happens when an old tragedy meets the modern desire to turn uncertain human choices into confident predictions.

Macbeth would recognise the attraction. Someone has found a way to tell him that his private ambition corresponds with the direction of the world.

The unsettling part is how little the machine would need to tell him.

The opening below develops the premise before discussing the full plot. From the next section onwards, there are spoilers for Macbeth, including its ending.

Shakespeare Gives Macbeth a Choice

The original Macbeth begins as a successful soldier. He has served King Duncan with courage and receives a new title as a reward. Before he knows about that promotion, three witches greet him as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and a future king.

One title is already his. Another is about to be confirmed. The third offers a future far beyond his present position.

That sequence matters. The witches establish credibility before presenting the promise that captures his imagination. When messengers confirm that he has become Thane of Cawdor, the prediction about kingship becomes harder for Macbeth to dismiss.

Yet the witches never instruct him to murder Duncan. Macbeth supplies that possibility himself. He also briefly considers waiting to see whether he might become king without intervening. Shakespeare allows the audience to see an alternative before Macbeth abandons it.

The relationship between ambition and responsibility is therefore present before the first crime. The prophecy creates pressure, but it does not remove choice. Macbeth knows that Duncan is his king, his relative and his guest. He can identify reasons against killing him. His later conduct cannot be explained by ignorance of the boundary he crosses.

A corporate adaptation needs to preserve that awareness. A decent employee hypnotised into wrongdoing by malicious software would be a different character. Macbeth is more disturbing because he understands enough to resist and chooses to proceed.

The AI forecast should sharpen that conflict. It offers him information he can use responsibly, along with language he can abuse.

The Witches Become a System That Has Been Right Before

The modern witches could be three consultants presenting a leadership forecast. Alternatively, they could become three outputs from one system: an imminent promotion, a probable leadership vacancy and a succession ranking placing Macbeth first.

The first forecast would come true quickly. Macbeth would receive the larger division or expanded budget the system had identified. That success would encourage him to trust its more ambitious assessment.

There is an important technical distinction here. Identifying a promotion already discussed in internal records would not demonstrate an ability to predict who will eventually lead the company. The system might have access to information Macbeth lacks. He could mistake that informational advantage for extraordinary foresight.

The drama would turn on his failure to ask what the system actually knows. Which records produced the assessment? What period does it cover? Does it estimate who will be appointed, who would perform best or who resembles previous appointees? Those questions concern different outcomes, even if a presentation slides between them.

Macbeth would prefer the impressive headline. Its authority would grow as the conditions disappeared from his retelling. At home, he would describe himself as the predicted successor. In private, he might begin thinking of himself as the rightful one.

Shakespeare’s witches speak in riddles. A business forecast could achieve a similar effect through an apparently precise answer to a poorly defined question. The ambiguity would sit beneath a polished chart, where Macbeth had little desire to examine it.

A Prediction Cannot Tell Him What He Deserves

Suppose the fictional report says Macbeth is the likeliest internal successor if Duncan leaves. That statement would not mean Duncan should leave. Nor would it establish that Macbeth deserves the job, that his appointment would benefit employees or that interference with the process is justified.

The conditions matter as much as the conclusion. A forecast about what happens after a vacancy says nothing by itself about whether someone should create that vacancy.

Macbeth would cross that gap through self-interest. Duncan’s continued leadership would begin to feel like an obstruction to an outcome already validated elsewhere. A colleague’s promotion would seem unfair because it delayed his own expected rise.

The language of inevitability would protect him from examining the impatience underneath. He would tell himself that the company needed renewal and that the report had merely confirmed what capable people already understood.

There could even be genuine weaknesses in Duncan’s leadership. Making Duncan imperfect would strengthen the adaptation. Organisations sometimes do need new leadership. An ambitious executive can identify a real problem and still respond through deceit, cruelty or an appetite for personal control.

Macbeth’s case would become most persuasive when it contained some truth. His supporters could agree that change was necessary without knowing what he had done to accelerate it. The eventual appointment would look legitimate to people who saw only the final vote.

Lady Macbeth Makes Hesitation Feel Like Failure

Lady Macbeth would need more substance than the familiar caricature of a ruthless wife encouraging a weak husband. In Shakespeare’s play, she recognises his ambition and questions whether he has the hardness to pursue its shortest route. She makes his reluctance a problem of identity.

In the corporate version, she could be his spouse and a senior strategist, with ambitions that have been frustrated by her own lack of access. She would understand the politics of the organisation and resent how patiently he accepts limits she considers negotiable.

She would press on the gap between his self-image and his conduct. He says he can lead, yet waits for someone else to choose him. He says Duncan lacks resolve, yet retreats when a difficult opening appears. She would translate moral hesitation into evidence that he might never become the person he claims to be.

That pressure preserves the original’s connection between ambition and ideas about masculinity. Macbeth’s willingness to harm becomes a test of his courage. In a boardroom adaptation, the vocabulary might concern decisiveness, executive presence and the capacity to make difficult calls.

Her influence would be strongest if the couple genuinely trusted each other at first. They would share the fantasy that promotion could finally release them from frustration. Their private conversation would provide a place where objections could be dismissed without challenge.

The tragedy would then include the destruction of that partnership. As Macbeth gained power, he would increasingly exclude the person who had helped him obtain it.

Duncan’s Removal Is the First Irreversible Act

A corporate adaptation would face a choice about violence. It could retain literal murder and become a thriller about executives committing homicide. Or it could translate the removal of Duncan into a deliberately engineered professional destruction.

The second approach could carry much of the original’s logic, provided the difference remained clear. Losing a job is not equivalent to being murdered. Shakespeare’s bodily violence gives his tragedy a gravity that an office analogy cannot simply claim for itself.

In this imagined version, Macbeth would conceal evidence that clears Duncan of a serious failure. He would allow a misleading account to reach the board, then present his own intervention as necessary for the company’s survival. Duncan would be forced out under a cloud that Macbeth knows is false.

His access would make the betrayal possible. As a trusted deputy, Macbeth would know which information reaches decision-makers and which explanations they are likely to accept. Duncan’s confidence in him would become the weakness he exploits.

The crucial scene would happen before the board meeting, when Macbeth could still submit the missing evidence. He would have time to recognise what withholding it would do.

Afterwards, the vacancy would open. The succession process would identify the candidate already favoured by the model. Macbeth would take the job and look at the original report with renewed conviction. Its apparent accuracy would help conceal his own contribution to the result.

When the Forecast Helps Produce Its Own Outcome

There is a real research concept relevant to this part of the adaptation. Juan Perdomo and his co-authors describe performative prediction: situations in which using a prediction changes the outcome being predicted. Their work provides a framework for studying that interaction. It does not establish that a fictional succession tool could forecast Macbeth’s career.

Imagine that a company’s model identifies certain employees as future leaders. Managers then give those employees better projects, greater visibility and access to influential sponsors. When those employees advance, the organisation may treat the result as proof of the model’s insight. Some of the observed success, however, may reflect opportunities distributed because of its output.

That example is an illustration of the feedback problem, rather than a finding about every workplace system. Predictions can influence decisions in many ways, and their effects need investigation.

Macbeth’s version would be unusually deliberate. He would hear that he could succeed Duncan, help force Duncan out and then cite his appointment as confirmation. The forecast would become part of the chain of events it appeared merely to describe.

This gives the adaptation a richer question than whether the software was right. The audience would need to ask how the result came about, what would have happened without the forecast and who paid for the actions taken in response.

Those questions would be precisely the ones Macbeth wanted removed from the review.

Banquo Remembers What Happened Before the Promotion

Banquo is dangerous to Macbeth because he shares knowledge of the beginning. In the play, he hears the witches and later suspects that Macbeth has used foul means to obtain the crown. The promise that Banquo’s descendants will become kings also threatens Macbeth’s hopes for a lasting dynasty.

A modern Banquo could be an executive who attended the original presentation and retained its qualifications. He would remember that the forecast concerned a possible succession, rather than a recommendation to remove Duncan. He might also know which evidence disappeared before Duncan’s departure.

Macbeth would initially describe Banquo’s reservations as resistance to change. Later, he would treat Banquo’s credibility as a threat to the company itself. A person who questioned the leader would become, in the leader’s account, a person undermining everyone’s future.

This is where the corporate tyrant begins to emerge. Macbeth would control assignments, access and the terms in which performance was discussed. Banquo’s removal could be presented as an organisational decision while being driven by Macbeth’s need to silence a witness.

The adaptation should give Banquo relationships and responsibilities beyond his function in Macbeth’s story. The audience needs to see what his exclusion costs: a team deprived of protection, a colleague afraid to speak or a family living through the consequences of an accusation.

Macbeth’s security would depend on making other people less secure. Once he accepted that bargain, the list of threatening people would keep expanding.

The Company Learns Which Answers Are Safe

After taking power, Macbeth would demand evidence of success. His staff would soon discover that some evidence was more welcome than other evidence.

A disappointing result could still be reported, but the person presenting it would face a hostile meeting. A positive result would receive attention and resources. Over time, managers would learn to delay bad news, soften warnings and frame uncertainty as manageable.

The organisation would become harder for its own leader to understand. Macbeth would see cleaner reports while the people closest to operations saw unresolved problems. Employees would spend increasing effort anticipating his reaction instead of examining the work.

This would connect him with Ahab’s destructive leadership. In Moby-Dick, a captain’s private obsession takes command of a shared enterprise. In the imagined company, Macbeth’s need to prove his appointment justified would gradually replace the purpose employees believed they served.

His use of analytics would intensify the distortion if he controlled both the decisions and their evaluation. A division he had deprived of resources could miss its targets. The failure could then be cited as evidence that its manager deserved removal.

The presentation would contain numbers. The story behind those numbers would include choices the presentation omitted. Macbeth would come to prefer that abbreviated version because it made him appear consistently necessary.

Banquo’s Ghost Enters the Results Presentation

In Shakespeare’s banquet scene, Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost and loses control before his guests. Lady Macbeth tries to manage the situation, but the public occasion becomes evidence that something is wrong.

A corporate equivalent could take place during an annual results presentation. Macbeth would be describing the strength of his leadership when a slide, a question or the sight of Banquo’s former team disrupted the account he had rehearsed.

The adaptation could preserve an actual hallucination. It could also make the disturbance more ambiguous, allowing the audience to see Macbeth’s guilt intruding into an ordinary event. Either way, his response should reveal a fear that the audience around him cannot fully understand.

He might answer a question nobody asked or defend himself against an allegation nobody has yet made. A moment intended to demonstrate control would expose how much of his attention is occupied by what he has concealed.

Lady Macbeth would attempt to contain the damage through explanations and interruptions. In private, she would find that she could no longer reach him. Their conversations would concern new risks and new enemies, with little room for the intimacy that once made their ambition feel shared.

For her, guilt could take the form of compulsively revisiting records she had helped alter. Deleting another copy would offer temporary relief, followed by the fear that some trace remained. The stain would persist because she remembered the act, regardless of what the archive contained.

The Second Forecast Promises Safety

Macbeth returns to the witches after obtaining power. Their later assurances encourage him to believe that familiar forms of defeat cannot reach him. He will not be vanquished until Birnam Wood moves towards Dunsinane, and no person born of a woman will harm him.

He receives statements whose wording leaves room for consequences he refuses to imagine. His confidence depends on the ordinary meanings he assigns to them.

In the corporate adaptation, Macbeth would commission another forecast, this time about threats to his position. It might conclude that no internal candidate had enough support to displace him and that existing ownership arrangements made a hostile takeover unlikely.

Those could be reasonable findings within a defined scenario. Macbeth would convert them into a broader promise that he was safe. He would give little attention to excluded possibilities: allies acting together, new evidence changing loyalties or an external event altering the company’s position.

The AI system would not have to invent anything. A limited assessment could become dangerously reassuring because of how Macbeth used it. He would remember the conclusion and lose interest in its scope.

There is also a difference between a statistical forecast and a language model producing a fluent explanation. A system that writes convincingly about a scenario has not thereby demonstrated that it can estimate the scenario’s probability reliably. The adaptation should avoid blending those capabilities merely because both are sold under the name of AI.

Macbeth, however, would welcome an explanation that made his preferred interpretation sound thorough.

Macduff Gives Resistance a Personal Cost

Macduff matters because opposition to Macbeth eventually involves more than a contest over leadership. In the original play, Macbeth orders the killing of Macduff’s wife and children. The suffering reaches people who cannot plausibly be described as rivals for the crown.

A corporate translation cannot reproduce that atrocity through a routine disagreement or dismissal. It can preserve the widening reach of retaliation. Macbeth might punish an entire department because its head questioned him, or destroy a junior employee’s prospects to pressure someone more influential.

Such a scene would show how far he had travelled from his original justification. He once claimed the organisation needed his leadership. He would now be damaging its people to protect his position.

Macduff’s resistance would need practical support. One brave speech would be insufficient where Macbeth controlled information and appointments. Colleagues would have to preserve records, compare accounts and find a route through which evidence could be considered independently.

Their hesitation would deserve attention too. Some would have benefited from Macbeth’s rise. Others would have seen only fragments of the harm. Building a case would require people to acknowledge their own mistakes and abandon the comforting belief that someone else had already checked.

The drama would gain force from that difficulty. Macbeth’s power would rest partly on the separation of people who knew different pieces of the truth.

Birnam Wood Moves Through the Building

In the play’s final movement, Malcolm’s soldiers carry branches from Birnam Wood as camouflage. What Macbeth treated as an impossible event becomes a military action. Macduff then reveals that he was delivered prematurely from his mother’s womb, undoing Macbeth’s confidence in the promise about those born of women.

The ending exposes the distance between the words Macbeth heard and the protection he assumed they offered. He recognises the deception when there is little time left to respond.

The corporate version could bring together threats assessed separately in his reassuring report. Former colleagues, employees and investors might act in concert after independent evidence established what happened to Duncan and Banquo. A board that once accepted Macbeth’s explanations could lose the ability to ignore them.

No single challenger would need to become overwhelmingly powerful. The change would come through coordination and new information. Macbeth would confront a situation outside the narrow one he had treated as a guarantee.

His final defence would probably emphasise the system. The report had identified him. The forecasts had supported his strategy. The organisation had approved his appointment.

But the investigation would concern decisions for which a model offered no defence: the evidence he withheld, the people he punished and the records he allowed others to mistake for a complete account. The tool’s limitations would matter without settling the question of his responsibility.

After Macbeth, Someone Must Be Able to Say No

Shakespeare ends with Macbeth defeated and Malcolm becoming king. A corporate adaptation would need to consider what the surviving organisation did next. Replacing a leader would leave the reporting structures and incentives that helped protect him available to a successor.

Here, the useful real-world connection is to governance. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s voluntary AI Risk Management Framework treats trustworthiness as something to consider across the design, development, use and evaluation of AI systems. That broad approach fits the problem better than an inquiry confined to whether Macbeth’s first forecast was accurate.

For the imagined company, reform would mean establishing who could question a model, inspect the assumptions behind a decision and report retaliation without appealing to the person accused. Leadership forecasts would need a defined purpose and visible limits. An appointment process would need evidence beyond a favoured candidate’s interpretation of a score.

None of that would make betrayal impossible. It would give other people a better chance of stopping it before their objections became career risks.

There is a useful counterpoint in Prospero’s relationship with control. The Tempest makes the relinquishing of power part of its resolution. Macbeth becomes progressively less able to imagine any boundary he should accept.

The final scene of this modern version could therefore belong to an employee rather than the new chief executive. She brings a worrying result to the first meeting after Macbeth’s departure. The figures contradict the leadership team’s preferred account of recovery.

This time, someone asks her to explain them. She finishes speaking without being interrupted.

Sources

• Folger Shakespeare Library — Macbeth: Entire Play — Primary text for the prophecies, Macbeth’s choices, the major characters and the ending.

• Juan C. Perdomo, Tijana Zrnic, Celestine Mendler-Dünner and Moritz Hardt — Performative Prediction — Research framework for predictions that influence the outcomes they aim to predict; first submitted in 2020.

• National Institute of Standards and Technology — AI Risk Management Framework — Voluntary framework addressing trustworthiness across the development and use of AI systems.

Next Reads

• Macbeth Explained: Ambition, Lady Macbeth and the Ending — Follow the original tragedy’s plot and character development alongside this modern interpretation.

• Moby-Dick Explained: Ahab, the White Whale and the Ending — Consider another leader whose personal obsession puts everyone under his authority at risk.

• The Tempest Explained: Prospero, the Island, Freedom and the Ending — Explore Shakespeare’s contrasting treatment of control, revenge and the possibility of giving up power.