GoDaddy's CEO Trash-Detector: Aman Bhutani Refuses to Read AI Texts

GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani has a blunt policy for AI-written documents arriving in his inbox: he doesn't read them.

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

His reasoning is practical, not ceremonial. Bhutani says he wants to make sure his employees are thinking for themselves — and he believes machine-drafted text signals the opposite.

The policy may sound harsh. It fits a pattern among executives who still treat writing as a core workplace skill rather than a task to outsource.

How does Bhutani spot AI writing?

He says it's easy. The telltale signs he looks for include:

• Excessive length
• An overly punchy tone
• Language that is a little too perfect

Detection is only the entry point, though. Bhutani's real concern is what AI-generated prose hides: the absence of an original idea behind it.

"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."

That's the core of his argument. A model trained on existing content can remix the known world; it cannot surface the observation or hypothesis that exists only inside a specific person's head.

What is he actually looking for in a document?

Bhutani draws a line between polished output and the thinking that produced it. Being able to convey an idea clearly in writing, he argues, requires refining the idea itself — something he calls "the art of iteration."

When he opens a document, four questions drive his read:

• What was the original observation?
• What was the original hypothesis?
• What got you interested in this idea?
• Why do you think it matters?

Those are questions a language model can't answer on the author's behalf. They demand a first-person account of how an idea formed — which is precisely what Bhutani says he's screening for.

In short: he reads for the author, not the prose.

Who else in tech shares this stance?

Bhutani is far from alone. Zapier CEO Wade Foster has named the failure mode "the comprehension gap" — the situation where executives use AI to craft communications and later can't explain their own work.

Sam Altman has described writing as "externalized thinking," saying that putting difficult problems into words helps him clarify his ideas.

Publishing executive JD Barker, writing recently in Fast Company, has argued that writing forces people to confront weaknesses in their reasoning.

"When someone sits down to explain a decision in plain language, they run into every soft spot in their reasoning," Barker wrote. "A manager who can write a clear one-page memo can usually think clearly about the problem in it."

The takeaway from these executives is consistent: writing isn't documentation of thinking. It's the mechanism.

What does this mean for AI in the workplace?

The stance cuts against the current push to hand drafting tasks to AI tools. Executives at GoDaddy, Zapier and beyond are drawing a line: AI can assist, but the idea and the reasoning behind it must remain traceable to a human.

Bhutani's inbox policy turns that principle into enforcement. Send him machine prose and the document dies unread; send him a rough but original argument and it earns his time.

For employees drafting their next memo, the message from the corner office is simple: the shortcut doesn't save time if nobody above you reads the result.