Seeing Is Not Deciding: Can Multimodal LLMs Act as Effective CEOs?

Large language models are increasingly applied as autonomous decision-making agents. However, in executive business decisions, existing benchmarks are limited to textonly settings. This makes it unclear whether models can perceive visual business evidence and effectively integrate it to improve decision quality. We introduce C-SUITEBENCH, a controlled multimodal benchmark that includes five decision tasks under paired text-only and multimodal conditions across 50 scenarios. We place nine frontier models in the role of a chief executive officer and evaluate their decision-making ability. Multimodal inputs consistently improve evidence-centric reasoning, with the largest and most reliable gains appearing in risk forecasting and board-facing justification. However, we uncover a multimodal integration paradox: adding visual business information degrades constrained resource allocation for all nine models, even as visual grounding itself improves. Ablation experiments reveal that this failure emerges from signal crowding, although each visual channel helps individually, their combination disrupts constraint satisfaction during decoding. These findings demonstrate that visual perception and constrained action are separable bottlenecks in multimodal agents, and that indiscriminate visual augmentation can harm high-stakes decision making, motivating selective grounding strategies for future executive AI systems.

SportD: Can VLMs Physically Strategize?

Vision--language models have become increasingly capable of interpreting visual scenes, but it remains unclear whether they can use information to make strategically effective decisions. We investigate this question in soccer, where models observe the seconds preceding an on-ball decision and must choose whether to shoot or pass to a specific teammate. Unlike conventional visual-understanding tasks, soccer enables decisions to be evaluated quantitatively by estimating the value of every available action. We introduce SportD, a benchmark comprising 478 on-ball decisions from the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Each model choice is evaluated against a possession-value model that estimates the action that most increases the attacking team's probability of scoring, allowing us to measure both optimal-action accuracy and the value forfeited by suboptimal decisions. Across three frontier VLMs, the best selects the highest-valued action on 31.4% of events, compared with 38.9% for the professional players, and all models incur significantly greater regret. Further analysis reveals a systematic preference for lower-variance and lower-reward actions: VLMs shoot less often and select substantially less progressive passes than either the optimal policy or the real players. The models also reproduce the player's specific action above chance even when that action is suboptimal, suggesting partial imitation of familiar play patterns rather than consistent evaluation of counterfactual alternatives. SportD provides a value-grounded testbed for measuring physical strategic reasoning in VLMs.