The first thing you learn when you build AI agents yourself (not just use them, but actually build them), is what they still can’t do.
The second thing you learn is how few executives know the difference.
I run Syndio, a 140-person pay-decision intelligence company serving nearly 400 enterprise customers, including half the Fortune 100. Two years ago, I was using AI the way most executives do: organizing information, drafting emails. It helped at the margins and missed what mattered. The drafts were polished. They sounded nothing like me. More importantly, the AI reasoned nothing like me.
In my early innings with AI, I made all the rookie mistakes. And unfortunately, my mistakes became magnified because I was also modeling for my team. I used AI to create the agendas for my executive-leadership meetings. Without context and direction, those agendas became word salads and AI slop. I knew it could do better.
So I enrolled in a six-week course for executives taught by Nufar Gaspar, a former Intel executive. It didn’t teach us to use AI. It taught us to build systems that could reason alongside us, that remember context, challenge assumptions, and adapt to how we think, not how a product manager imagined we might.
