AI Can Enhance Meetings, But Challenges Remain in Implementation and Reliability

AI has the potential to transform work meetings by making them more productive and reducing frustrations, but challenges remain in ensuring the technology is reliable and doesn’t introduce new sources of tension between colleagues.

Key takeaways: Jaime Teevan, chief scientist at Microsoft, believes AI is on the verge of transforming work meetings in significant ways:

• AI can help generate ideas, reflect on discussions, and make meetings more efficient by assisting with tasks like transcription and summarization.
• Major video meeting providers like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet are already incorporating AI-powered assistants with rapidly expanding capabilities.

The promise of AI in meetings: Proponents envision AI acting as a coach and moderator to make meetings more productive:

• AI could help prepare and inform participants before meetings, leading to more valuable discussions and decision-making.
• The technology might provide feedback on things like individual speaking time to encourage more balanced participation.
• Microsoft reports its Copilot AI is already helping users summarize meetings four times faster.

Potential pitfalls and frustrations: While AI may solve some meeting pain points, it could introduce new sources of annoyance:

• Business psychologist Jess Barker suggests AI might enable poor meeting etiquette, like having the AI attend on someone’s behalf or catch latecomers up to speed, breeding resentment among colleagues.
• The technology is not yet foolproof and can make mistakes or “hallucinations,” requiring ongoing work to improve its accuracy and reliability.

Looking ahead: Microsoft remains convinced AI will help people feel less overwhelmed in meetings, spark ideas, and provide valuable support. However, careful implementation will be key to ensuring AI enhances rather than detracts from meeting experiences and group dynamics. Ongoing advances in AI prompting and personalization will be critical to providing users with the most relevant and accurate assistance.