I wish I could go to more meetings today
AI will change meetings forever. That means AI will change your business culture. Will that be a burden or an opportunity?
“Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.”
JK Galbraith
I spent most of my career in a culture where meetings had only a rough agenda. No-one took minutes. An email with actions never followed. If you agree to do something in a meeting, just get on and do it afterwards.
That might sound crazy, but it was a good fit with the culture. I fitted into that culture pretty well. So I annoy people by taking the same approach to meetings today.
There is no right or wrong way to do meetings (despite what you may read elsewhere.) Meetings are about people interacting together. Every group finds its own way. As a result, meetings are agents that reflect and define the culture, communications, and context of every organisation.
AI is changing meetings forever. Tools that change the way we handle meetings are available, low cost, and in common use. Taqtiq and Sembly are examples of specific tools. Google and Microsoft are also introducing transcription and note generation AI features.
We all have some experience of this. Covid drove the adoption of video conferencing from the fringe to the mainstream. I think AI will lead to a more complex and deeper change.
AI tools raise questions like:
Why bother to attend a meeting? If my AI is going to dial in and send me a summary.
What if I attend 3 or more meetings at a time? How productive could I be then?
How should I run meetings if it's a mix of bots and people?
How messy will the screen be with 5 bots and 6 people attending?
What about in person only meetings? If everyone uses automated notes, do I need to record every meeting? Even the one in the pub after work?
Imagine the bureaucracy afterwards as everyone disputes the notes and actions based on their own version. And maybe an AI can generate those disputes automatically as well?
One idea would be a central meeting bot, so everyone gets the same summary.
At the moment, these AIs produce slightly different results. So how to handle someone who has a preferred note taker that highlights exactly the information they need?
Read this article about reliance on summaries from the team at discy. Now apply this thinking to meetings.
What if everyone relies on summaries and action lists? Will your team miss things? What will they focus on that might have seemed unimportant in the room?
Some of these things may seem small, even petty. This is how change works. If AI changes the way people behave in and around meetings, it changes culture. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Changing culture matters.
How can you harness this change to help your business grow and thrive?
Keep an open mind - no-one knows how this will play out.
Observe and learn. Your team, your customers, and your suppliers are using these AI tools in meetings now. Learn what works, what changes, where the opportunities for better communication and collaboration arise.
There is a view that AI can enhance communications and break down silos. If this is true, then AI in meetings will be one of the first channels for that change. How can you take advantage of that improvement?
Will summaries and wider comms ramp up information overload? How can you support your people and move to better information, not just more information?
Human interaction is much more complex than any written, audio, or video. Make space for human only meetings (and don’t bother with agendas or minutes!).
Doing the next right thing
AI is changing how meetings work. No-one knows how that will work out. How can you take advantage of the opportunity to get more productive, build a better culture and have more fun? If you are interested in thinking that through, I would love to talk to you.
Thanks for reading.