Have the AI notetakers fixed bad meetings?
“Otter.ai! So great to see you here. It’s been minutes.”
“Copilot, loved your thesis on this morning’s sales meeting.”
“Gemini, good weekend???”
“Fireflies.ai, haven’t seen you in a while. Everything good?”
“Jim, Jim’s Zoom Ai Companion, lovely to have both of you join.”
“I’m looking forward to getting all of your summaries and action items after we meet!”
Have you had a meeting yet where more of the participants are AI note takers than people? I haven’t yet, but it’s getting closer with every meeting. It’s a funny experience. I don’t knock it. I use a notetaker, mostly for client discovery or planning meetings. It’s great for sorting through the details allowing me to stay engaged in the conversation. I still take some pencil and paper notes along the way, but those are more visual notes like boxes and arrows that help me understand connection points. I’ve also dropped notes from previous meetings into Gemini and asked it to spot any important follow ups for an upcoming meeting. More than once it’s found something I would have missed.
I’m definitely getting value from my notetaker, but I haven’t gotten the courage to send it off on any solo missions yet. Is it ready? It’s so young.
Depending on the group and if I can find someone to play along, I like to have a little fun with the AI notetakers attending on behalf of their humans. While we wait to get started I’ll strike up a conversation about something ridiculous like the polar bear with a new sales strategy involving pepperoni pizza. Try it sometime. It’s funny to see how the note takers fit in those details.
One unintended consequence of AI notetakers shows up whenever I use breakout rooms, which I do a lot. I’ve sent people off to breakout rooms where they find themselves with only notetakers, no humans. Or I see that there’s a breakout room with no humans at all. I have to quickly shuffle the groups. It’s not a huge issue, but definitely something that’s become less efficient since the dawn of AI notetakers. I’m sure at some point the video conferencing tools will come up with a fix, but for now it’s annoying.
Aside from unintended consequences, the notetakers feel like one of those “just because we can, does it mean we should?” situations.
Before AI notetakers existed, a human was designated as the meeting note taker. I did this job many times. I’d listen intently and type as fast as I could. After the meeting, I quickly summarized what I captured and sent it out to the group.
During the next meeting people would ask questions about the last meeting. The answers were always in the meeting notes I’d sent around. This happened so much that I began to resent the note taker role. If people weren’t reading them, why was I sending them? I’ve never seen stats for how many people read post meeting summaries, human or AI, but my experiences tell me that it’s far from 100%.
The capability does add value, but does every meeting need it? Instead of just sharing summaries and action items, we could be automatically updating project trackers or creating new tasks.That makes immediate use of the notes.
Another unintended consequence I’ve seen is more people double or triple booking themselves, sending their notetaker to meetings they can’t attend. Is that a good thing? Years ago, I wrote an article called “Meetings don’t have to suck”. In it, I propose a simple formula for what I call the “Calendar Cleanse” where you look at every meeting on your calendar in the last week and ask:
Do I add value to this meeting?
Do I get value from this meeting?
If both are a “no”, cancel or decline the meeting.
That rule still applies, though the fact that we can clone ourselves to some degree makes it easier to skip the cleanse. If you are double booked, take a moment to ask those two questions before accepting. If you’re that busy, will you even have time to digest what AI captures on your behalf? Is it worth digesting at all?
My point in all of this is that we should be examining use cases before throwing AI at them. Why waste this powerful tool on something that didn’t really need to be done in the first place?