Where does the term centaur come from?

From chess. After losing to IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, Garry Kasparov promoted advanced chess, in which a human player works with a computer. He argued that a human and machine with a better process could beat a stronger machine alone.

What is the difference between a centaur and a cyborg way of working with AI?

In a 2023 Harvard Business School and BCG study of consultants using GPT-4, 'centaurs' divided work between themselves and the AI, handing off whole sub-tasks, while 'cyborgs' blended their work with the AI step by step. A Centaur CTO decides deliberately which mode each kind of work should run in.

Does a Centaur CTO automate everything?

No. The point is to use AI to reclaim attention for leadership work that cannot be delegated, not to automate the most work. Deciding what should not be automated is part of the job.

What Is a Centaur CTO?

The idea behind The Centaur CTO: Leading with AI to Be More Human.

By Frank Goortani · September 23, 2026

A Centaur CTO is a chief technology officer who combines AI leverage with human judgment. AI takes on speed, analysis and execution. The CTO keeps the work that should not be delegated: decisions, accountability, product taste, ethics and leading people. The goal is not to automate the most work. It is to use AI to win back attention for the parts of leadership only a person can do.

Where the term comes from

The word comes from chess. After losing to IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, Garry Kasparov championed "advanced chess", in which each player works alongside a computer. His conclusion was about process, not raw power: a human and a machine working together through a better process could beat a stronger machine playing alone. Half human, half machine, hence the centaur.

Centaur or cyborg?

A 2023 field experiment by Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group gave consultants GPT-4 and watched how they worked. Two patterns emerged. Centaurs split the work: they decided which sub-tasks to hand to the AI and which to keep. Cyborgs wove the AI into every step. Both can work. The leadership skill is choosing the mode on purpose, per task, and knowing how to review the output of each.

What a Centaur CTO hands to AI

First drafts: code, tests, documentation, specs and summaries
Analysis at scale: reading large codebases, logs, research and options
Pattern-finding: code smells, security issues, architectural trade-offs
Keeping up: synthesising a fast-moving field into what matters this week

What a Centaur CTO keeps

Judgment: what to build, what to cut, when to take on debt deliberately
Accountability: owning outcomes, including the ones AI contributed to
People: hiring, coaching, psychological safety, culture
Ethics and trust: what is right for customers, users and the team
The line itself: deciding what should not be automated

Why it matters now

AI makes execution cheap. That makes judgment relatively more valuable, and it makes a CTO's attention the scarcest resource in an engineering organisation. A CTO who automates everything loses the judgment the company depends on. A CTO who ignores AI loses the leverage. The Centaur CTO does neither: AI speed, human responsibility.

The book

The Centaur CTO: Leading with AI to Be More Human turns this idea into an operating system for technology leaders: how to hire and coach AI-augmented teams, make product and architecture decisions with AI in the loop, run production AI systems responsibly, and lead at each company stage. It is coming at the end of 2026.

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