Can we make work meetings more bearable?

Work meetings can sometimes be incredibly powerful.

Like the one Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist, says she had a few years ago with her chief executive, Satya Nadella, and Sam Altman, founder of the leading artificial intelligence firm OpenAI.

It had such a visceral impact on Ms. Teevan that she sat in her car afterward, screaming, excited about the possibility of AI.

“I’ve never done it before, but there was too much emotion,” she says.

The meeting showcased the potential of OpenAI’s now-popular ChatGPT chatbot for AI. And it left Ms Teevan believing that artificial intelligence could be on the verge of transforming many things, including meetings.

“Historically, computing has been pretty good at helping to streamline drudgery,” he says. “But to have something that can help throw out a lot of ideas and be able to reflect on them, it really looks qualitatively different and a real opportunity.”

However, while Ms. Teevan will remember this particular work meeting for a long time, for most of us such meetings with colleagues can be a chore.

Elon Musk once said that “excessive meetings are the bane of large companies and almost always get worse over time.” Few would disagree.

And your brain activity drops when you have a Zoom meeting, says a report by researchers from Yale University in the US and the UK’s University College London.

Yet due to the coronavirus pandemic, many businesses and organizations have been forced to move their meetings online back in 2020, with everyone sitting in front of a webcam.

And like them or hate them, there are video conferences like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

Ms Teevan says the transition was “fortuitous” because it “created an opportunity for AI [positively] influence our meeting”.

The big three video conferencing providers certainly think so, and all now offer AI assistants to users. Zoom has AI Companion, Teams has Copilot, and Meet has Duet AI.

Rapidly expanding features already include AI transcribing the meeting for you, suggesting questions you might want to ask, summarizing the meeting in bullet points, reminding you who else is present, or even in the case of Meet, its AI attends an online meeting. on your behalf.

Husayn Kassai is the founder of London-based start-up Quench AI, which makes training software powered by artificial intelligence.

He predicts that in the future, “everyone in the workforce will have some kind of AI trainer accompanying them to meetings.”

“Meetings will be much more productive because we’ll go into them much better informed and able to make more useful and valuable judgments,” says Mr. Kassai.

He adds that workers will use artificial intelligence “to help them get a clue and give them a breakdown of information.”

As a result, he says, meetings will begin to achieve things, unlike now, because “people don’t talk about the things that matter because they’re not ready.”

Mr. Kassai also envisions AI acting as a sort of moderator, offering feedback after the meeting, perhaps even pointing out things that humans in the room can’t do.

“When you’ve got an idiot in the boardroom who’s coughing and someone who doesn’t speak much… AI could say things like ‘speaker three, you’ve only spoken 2% of the time and next time you’ll have to speak 20% of the time.’

Ms Teevan says Copilot is already having a “pretty significant impact” on people’s video conferencing. “People are able to summarize meetings four times faster.”

Yet, as numerous reports over the past year have indicated, AI is not yet reliable and can make mistakes, or as they are also called “hallucinations.”

Echoing the old adage “garbage in, garbage out”, Ms Teevan says Microsoft is currently doing a lot of work to ensure Copilot’s “AI guidance” is as good as it can be.

An AI challenge refers to an AI that provides the best possible answer to a user’s question. To do this, it needs to be able to learn as quickly as possible who the user is, what they do for work, and what answers they are most likely to want.

“One of the most common ways I use AI is to ask it what questions I should ask in a meeting,” says Ms Teevan.

For AI to get the right answers, Ms. Teevan says, it needs to “understand that I’m a scientist and an executive at Microsoft.”

Business psychologist Jess Barker says it’s easy to see why so many of us dislike work meetings. “The data suggests, as does our experience, that most meetings are time-consuming and ineffective.”

She’s also “not convinced that the general level of frustration will completely disappear” thanks to AI. “I think we may find that we continue to be frustrated with meetings, but for different reasons — like being annoyed with Person A who never shows up for a Monday morning meeting but instead demands that an AI tool attend on their behalf.

“Or the frustration of a person who is late to every meeting and uses an AI tool to update what they missed so far. I understand how this could lead to increased resentment and mistrust among colleagues.’

However, Microsoft’s Ms. Teevan is convinced that artificial intelligence will help improve meetings. “It can help people feel less overwhelmed, it can help them get started and tick things off the list. And it can help spark ideas, see things in new ways, and get support.”