Yeah, the examples in the article are terrible. I can be direct when talking to my boss. "My kid is sick, I'm taking the day off" is entirely sufficient.

But it's handy when the recipient is less familiar. When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more. And it can be hard knowing what that needs to be, especially for a non-native speaker. LLMs tend to take it too far in the other direction, but you can get it to tone it down, or just take the pieces that you like.

I think you might be misunderstanding the suggestion - typically when people say "email like a CEO" they're talking about direct 1:1 or small group communications (specifically the direct and brief style of writing popular with busy people in those communications), not the sort of mass-distribution PR piece that all employees at a large enterprise might receive quarterly.

For contrast:

"All: my daughter is home sick, I won't be in the office today" (CEO style)

vs

"Hi everyone, I'm very sorry to make this change last minute but due to an unexpected illness in the family, I'll need to work from home today and won't be in the office at my usual time. My daughter has the flu and could not go to school. Please let me know if there are any questions, I'll be available on Slack if you need me." (not CEO style)

An AI summary of the second message might look something like the first message.