I think the difference between middle management and C-suite is nothing more than (1) the extent to which you can keep yourself from drinking your own psychotic kool-aid, and (2) the ability to present your psychotic kool-aid tactfully.
This is such a ridiculous thing to say, and sadly, I think that it's only on a subconscious level that he's saying this to help MS AI products. Having interacted with many such people, I think they repeat the corporate line so much they actually end up buying into it themselves. CEOs are smart enough to know they're saying psycho bullshit. Middle management ends up fooling themselves, and as a result of their true belief, they don't see any need to mask their insane nonsense ideas like "we should tell the people we lay off to talk to AI, maybe they'll use ours". A CEO at least has the sense to realize "this makes me look like a psycho who is trying to milk money out of people I fired. I'll save this idea for a closed-doors board meeting or something, not LinkedIn".
I believe this difference is what makes middle management so uniquely despicable. It's sort of like how (at least for me) I am less frustrated by televangelist con artists who clearly don't believe in what they say and are just trying to get rich, vs. the substantially more deranged megachurch pastors who actually are true believers yet still fool themselves into thinking it's reasonable to have a private jet. At least the televangelist knows what they are and (privately) owns up to their bastard nature. But the true believer wants it all. Not only do they want the direct satisfaction of their greed, but they want to feel morally justified in it.