The Habit Is Simple. The Argument Behind It Is Not.
Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio, has added an unusual item to her daily routine: one old-fashioned phone call — no Zoom, no Teams, no AI notetaker running in the background.
The point is not nostalgia. It is deliberate cognitive exercise. After each call, Colacurcio reconstructs the conversation from memory before she ever hands anything to an AI agent. She identifies themes, connects the dots, and writes her own summary first. The technology comes second.
'I make myself do the work first,' she writes in a commentary published by Fortune on August 18. 'The technology comes second.'
Why a CEO Is Worried About Her Own Thinking
Colacurcio frames the habit against what she calls the 'doom-and-hype cycle' surrounding artificial intelligence. In her telling, public discourse swings between two poles: AI as the second coming of the Industrial Revolution, unlocking unprecedented productivity and entirely new industries, or AI as a job-eliminating, resource-draining catastrophe.
Her concern is more personal and more precise. Every meeting can now be recorded, transcribed, summarized, and analyzed by machine. The temptation, she writes, is to stop paying full attention because the machine is paying it for you.
The skill she fears losing is not note-taking — she says that was never her edge. Her advantage, built over decades, was the ability to listen deeply enough to synthesize ideas in real time: to hear patterns, connect concepts, and ask the next question before anyone else saw the through-line.
'The most human part of listening isn't transcription,' she writes. 'It's noticing. It's sensing hesitation. It's recognizing what wasn't said.'
A Generational Data Point
Colacurcio, who is also the mother of seven, draws a generational contrast that carries its own market signal. Her cohort graduated chasing internships at Merrill, McKinsey, or Morgan Stanley. Her 19-year-old daughter Sofia's cohort, she writes, is launching businesses that pressure-wash garbage cans — unglamorous startups optimized not for prestige but for autonomy over schedule, work, and life.
The two wrote separate essays for Fortune weeks earlier — Colacurcio's titled 'Three Times the CEO I Was a Year Ago,' her daughter's 'I Don't Want AI to Think for Me' — without reading each other's drafts beforehand. The mother was 'unabashedly optimistic' about AI; the daughter was 'deeply skeptical.' They arrived at the same conclusion: there has to be a middle path.
Syndio, the company Colacurcio leads, raised a Series A round from Emerson Collective, the investment vehicle of Laurene Powell Jobs.
The Principle the Market Should Price In
Colacurcio's essay is a leadership opinion piece, not a product announcement. But the underlying argument has real capital implications. Enterprises are spending aggressively to automate knowledge work, and the productivity case is genuine. What the investment thesis rarely prices in is the degradation risk on the human side of the ledger.
Free enterprise has always rewarded the person in the room who hears what others miss. If every executive in every meeting is waiting for the AI summary instead of doing the cognitive work themselves, the competitive edge that justified the human salary disappears — and so does the judgment that no model has yet replicated. Colacurcio is not anti-technology. She is making a harder argument: that the highest-value use of AI is one that makes human thinking stronger, not one that quietly replaces it. That distinction will separate the leaders who compound over time from those who simply automate themselves into irrelevance.
