This CEO became 3x more productive with AI. Then she read what her daughter wrote about it at Dartmouth

Her daughter, Sofia Frei, just completed her first year at Dartmouth College. They wrote these essays independently. Editor’s note: Maria Colacurcio is the CEO of Syndio, a decision intelligence company focused on pay. Her daughter, Sofia Frei, just completed her first year at Dartmouth College. They wrote these essays independently. Part One: Three Times the CEO I Was a Year Ago by Maria Colacurcio, CEO, Syndio The strange part wasn’t watching the AI do my work. It was reading my own voice come back to me in something I never wrote. I’d spent the past year building agents to help run my company. Somewhere along the way, they learned to sound like me. Down to the tics. The short sentences. The way I trail off into a comma instead of landing the point. The weird little parentheses I drop where they don’t belong (like this one). I read a draft one of them had produced and went looking for the seam between what was mine and what was the machine’s, and couldn’t find it. That’s when I sat back and thought: What have I done? What scares me isn’t what AI can do. It’s how quickly it becomes indispensable. I had wanted this: I spent a year taking courses, building agents, and wiring these tools into how I think and run a 140-person company. It was working, faster and better than I thought it would. The thrill and the dread arrived in the same second. I’m not special in this. Right now millions of people are sitting where I sat, handing a piece of themselves to a machine and quietly deciding how much to trust what comes back. So let me explain what I actually built, because the fear in that moment is worth understanding before we hand this technology to everyone. My work is about pay: who gets the raise, the offer, the promotion. For as long as we’ve paid people, those decisions have been made quickly b