I'm lucky. On average, I only participate in video conferences for about 5 hours a week. I have friends and colleagues who spend this much time every day filming themselves on camera.
I've been doing video conferencing since the 1990s. At the time, it required his dedicated ISDN line and $1,000 worth of audio-video equipment to make it happen. Nowadays, even if you're at McDonald's, you can just open your laptop and go. At the time, I was excited when it worked. Today…not so much.
Most people call this Zoom fatigue, but you can find it on any video conferencing platform. Another name for the same effect is MEGO. This stands for “My Eyes Glaze Over.” You know what happens. A combination of boredom, scattered conversations, and lack of focus in meetings can quickly lead you to dozing off like an old man after a hearty lunch.
Zoom and its rivals are well aware of this phenomenon. And these days, they're combining visual tricks with AI to make meetings more lively and productive.
Visual games have been with us for a while. Who can forget “I'm Not a Cat!”? The meme from a civil forfeiture hearing held on Zoom in February 2021 when a filter was misused so the lawyer looked like a white kitten with gray markings and big eyes?
Now, this kind of thing is becoming more sophisticated, for better or worse. For example, Apple Vision Pro users can now use CGI avatars (personas) in Zoom meetings. Personas allow you to remove meeting participants' backgrounds and “pin” their real-time avatars to your physical workspace. (I have no doubt that these avatars will soon be able to move around in augmented reality space.)
I find it more fun than practical for business meetings. But you can see how Microsoft's Mesh can be useful when used in conjunction with Microsoft Teams and spatial audio, allowing avatars to have private conversations “away” from the main meeting.
Another meeting technology that I think is really taking off involves having an avatar join the meeting instead of you. Thanks to the Microsoft 365 Copilot chatbot and Google's Duet AI for Workspace, you can now capture minutes from meetings you didn't actually attend. Why not “make” it look like we're there when we're actually ordering a Big Mac?
Other tools, such as Zoom's AI Companion, are already making meetings more productive by providing an overview of the meeting, identifying action items, and encouraging people to share next steps. Personally, I've been doing this for a while by manually running Otter.AI, my audio transcription program of choice, in a video conferencing program. Now, Otter AI Assistant for Zoom meetings can do this on autopilot.
These are all neat and nifty things, but I'm still not convinced they'll be of much help. For example, if you had your avatar record a meeting to summarize what you needed to know or do, why didn't you just email it in the first place?
Of course, it would be a different story if there was a conversation. However, if the avatar is present at most of the meetings, the discussion will not proceed. So what does it mean?
Avatars and AI don't actually make video conferencing more productive. While it can be fun and useful, it doesn't address the real reason why many meetings are deadly boring.
My friend Alfred Poore (who is my video conferencing advisor and founder of The 75% Solution) told me: “I firmly believe there is no such thing as 'Zoom fatigue.'” Instead, I think people are observing “terrible Zoom fatigue.” This isn't all that different from the “bad boardroom fatigue” we've suffered from for generations. However, the vast majority of Zoom (and Teams, Google Meet, webinars, and all other platforms) meetings are not prepared and executed as intended. ”
Specifically, Pua believes that “the meeting itself – 'This meeting could have been done by email' – needs to be properly organized.” To do this, it is necessary to analyze the objectives as well as the type and direction of information flow required to achieve those objectives.
For example, if the meeting is just for the boss to tell people what's coming up for the coming quarter, it might be a webinar instead of a video conference. Or if you have a meeting to decide what will happen next quarter, only the people planning what to plan should be present, not everyone and their assistants. Your aide is fine with meeting minutes and action items.
Yes, there are times when video conferencing is necessary and helpful. Yes, using AI tools can increase productivity. And yes, I would love to have a meeting where my dog Terry's avatar and editor Lil Joe represent me. At least once it will be fun. But for video conferencing to be truly useful, it requires organization and planning, not technical tricks.
