The CEO’s Secret Weapon Against AI: Why I Force Myself to Make One Phone Call Every Day

(SeaPRwire) –   By: Ethan Gallagher

I used to think the real threat of AI was that it would take our jobs. Turns out the actual danger is far more subtle. It’s that we’ll forget how to think for ourselves.

This piece is based on a personal essay that landed on my desk last week. The author is a CEO, mother of seven, and someone who has spent decades building companies. Her name isn’t important right now. What matters is what she describes: a simple habit that reveals everything we’ve lost by outsourcing our cognitive labor to machines.

She makes one phone call a day. Not a Zoom. Not a Teams meeting with an AI notetaker humming in the background. A plain old phone call. Then she has to reconstruct the entire conversation from memory before handing anything to her AI agents. The technology comes second. She does the work first.

Here’s where most leaders miss the point. They see this as nostalgia. It’s not. It’s cognitive resistance training.

Every meeting can be recorded now. Every conversation transcribed, summarized, analyzed, and critiqued by AI. The temptation is enormous because the machine will catch you up later. You stop paying full attention. You outsource the listening. And somewhere along the way, the skill atrophies.

The CEO in question spent her career building an advantage not from taking the best notes but from listening deeply enough to synthesize ideas in real time. She heard patterns. She connected concepts. She asked the right question at the right moment. Those skills cannot be downloaded. They cannot be prompted. They live entirely in the human mind that chose to pay attention.

I watched a similar thing happen in semiconductor design teams I consulted with last year. Engineers who stopped sketching circuits by hand and moved everything to AI-assisted tools started missing subtle timing violations. The machines weren’t wrong. The engineers just forgot how to see the pattern. By the time they noticed, the product was already in the field.

The AI debate swings between two poles. One side says AI unlocks unprecedented productivity and entirely new industries. The other says it will eliminate every job and drain our resources until we’re hiding on remote ranches. The truth sits somewhere in the middle, and the CEO’s habit points exactly to that middle path.

She and her 19-year-old daughter Sofia read a novel called Yesteryear about a social-media “trad wife” who wakes up in 1855. The book exposes our tendency toward extremes. Devote yourself entirely to family and lose yourself. Climb the corporate ladder, sacrifice everything, and end up just as depleted. Neither story has to be true.

Her generation graduated hoping for internships at Merrill, McKinsey, or Morgan Stanley. Sofia’s generation is starting businesses that pressure-wash garbage cans. The ideas are rarely glamorous. That’s the point. They’re optimizing for autonomy. Control over schedules, work, and lives.

The CEO published two essays side by side recently. Hers: “Three Times the CEO I Was a Year Ago.” Sofia’s: “I Don’t Want AI to Think for Me.” She was unabashedly optimistic about AI. Her daughter was deeply skeptical. They wrote independently and didn’t read each other’s drafts until both were finished.

What struck me wasn’t the generational gap. It was the convergence underneath it. Both were trying to find a middle path. Not rejecting the technology. Not surrendering to it. Using it in ways that make our own thinking stronger instead of weaker.

The most human part of listening isn’t transcription. It’s noticing. It’s sensing hesitation. It’s recognizing what wasn’t said. It’s connecting ideas before anyone else sees the pattern. If we all stop participating because AI will catch us up later, who is actually left in the conversation?

Here’s what I’d tell every leader reading this. Start with one phone call per week. Make it analog. No recording. No notes taken during the call. Afterward, reconstruct the conversation from memory. Write down what was said, what wasn’t said, and what you heard that others might miss. Then, and only then, hand it to your AI tools for processing.

Do this for a month. You’ll notice something uncomfortable. Your brain remembers more than you thought it did. Your patterns of thinking sharpen. The gaps in your understanding become visible.

This isn’t about fearing AI. It’s about refusing to let it make you forgetful by design. The middle path isn’t a compromise. It’s a discipline.

Ethan Gallagher is a technology industry analyst and former Silicon Valley engineering manager who writes about the intersection of leadership, cognition, and AI adoption.