Can you make work meetings more bearable?

Work meetings can sometimes be incredibly powerful.

It's similar to a meeting that Microsoft's chief scientist Jamie Teevan had a few years ago with the company's CEO Satya Nadella and Sam Altman, founder of the major AI company OpenAI.

It made such a big impact on Teevan that she sat in her car afterwards screaming with joy at the possibilities of AI.

“I'd never done anything like that before and it was just too emotional,” she said.

The conference showcased the potential of OpenAI's now-popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, and it convinced Teevan that AI is on the verge of transforming many things, including meetings.

“Historically, computing has been very good at making tedious tasks more efficient,” she says, “but when you have something that can generate a bunch of ideas and then put them to work, that feels really qualitatively different and like a real opportunity.”

But while Teevan will long remember that particular work meeting, for most of us, such get-togethers with colleagues can be boring.

Elon Musk once said, “Excessive meetings are a plague on large companies, and they almost always get worse over time.” Few would disagree.

A report by researchers from Yale University in the US and University College London in the UK found that Zoom meetings reduce brain activity.

But as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies and organizations were forced to move their meetings online in 2020, with everyone sitting in front of a webcam.

Love them or hate them, video conferencing such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet are here to stay.

Teevan said the shift is due to “AI [positively] “It will have an impact on our meetings.”

The big three video conferencing technology companies certainly think so, and all now offer AI-powered assistants to their users: Zoom has AI Companion, Teams has Copilot, and Meet has Duet AI.

Rapidly expanding features include AI-powered transcription of meetings, suggesting questions, summarizing meetings in key points format, reminding you who else is in attendance, and even, in the case of Meet, joining online meetings on your behalf.

Hussein Kassai is the founder of Quench AI, a London-based startup that develops AI-powered training software.

He predicts that in the future, “every employee will have some kind of AI coach accompanying them to meetings.”

“Meetings will be much more productive because we'll come into the meeting more informed and be able to make more useful and valuable decisions,” Kassai says.

He added that workers will use AI “to understand the information and to know the breakdown.”

As a result, he says, meetings will start paying off, unlike now, when “people aren't talking about important things because they're not prepared.”

Kassai also envisions the AI ​​acting as a kind of moderator, offering feedback after meetings and perhaps pointing out points that a human on-site might not be able to make.

“If you have a room with a yelling idiot and someone who doesn't talk much, the AI ​​can say, 'Third speaker, you're only talking 2%. Next time you need to talk 20%.'”

Teevan claims that Copilot has already had a “pretty big impact” on people's video conferencing: “People can now summarize meetings four times faster.”

But as numerous reports over the past year have shown, AI is not yet infallible, can make mistakes, and can sometimes have so-called “hallucinations.”

Answering the old adage “garbage in, garbage out,” Teevan says Microsoft is working hard right now to make Copilot's “AI prompts” as good as they can be.

AI prompting is when an AI responds to a user's question with the best possible answer. To do this, it needs to be able to learn as quickly as possible who you are, what kind of work you do, and what answers you most want.

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

To get the right answer from the AI, Teeban says, it “needs to understand that I'm a research scientist and executive at Microsoft.”

Business psychologist Jess Baker says it's easy to understand why many of us hate work meetings: “Both the data and our own experience show that most meetings are time-consuming and ineffective.”

She also said she doesn't expect that AI will “fully eliminate the overall level of frustration. You might still be frustrated with meetings, but for different reasons, like being annoyed with Person A who never shows up for your Monday morning meeting and instead asks the AI ​​tool to attend.”

“Or the frustration of someone who is late to every meeting and then uses an AI tool to update them on what they've missed so far. It's understandable that this can lead to resentment and growing distrust between colleagues.”

But Microsoft's Teeban is convinced AI can help improve meetings: “It can help people feel less overwhelmed, it can help them get started and check items off their list. It can also help spark ideas, help them see things in new ways and get support from there.”