People hate meetings. So they are sending their secretaries to take notes

Last month Clifton Sellers attended a meeting by video call at his work. Everything seemed normal until he noticed the list of the attendees. Of the 16 who went to the appointment, Only six were human beings. The rest were sent to transcribe the meeting, take notes and summarize it. The surprising thing is that what happened to Sellers is no exception: the rule is increasingly.

To this meeting I come with my chatbot of AI. Some of the people who attended that meeting made it accompanied by AI chatbots to take notes and transcribe that meeting. And without warning, as if it were something totally normal. However, other chatbots of AI came alone on behalf of other employees. Those bots could only listen, not intervene. And yet we have a problem.

“I want to talk to people”. Sellers explained In The Washington Post How this type of meeting caused him rejection because “I don’t want to talk to a group of bots that take notes.” The situation is ironic, because he himself had sent to a bot to take notes to any meeting in the past. The situation is worrying, especially since video calls are deriving dangerously.

More meetings than ever. Pandemia caused Zoom, Teams or Meet to become the ideal alternative to physical meetings, and over time the phenomenon has transformed our way of working. According to Pumbleafter the pandemic there are 12.9% more doors per person and 13.5% more than meetings attendees. The video calls have caused, yes, that the meetings are much shorter (20.1%), but it is also happening something else.

Goodbye to social norms in video call. This predominance of virtual meetings through video calls is causing changes in the “label” of these meetings. In many work video calls employees Now they usually join without turning on the camera and with the silenced microphone. The second is more normal: that everyone has the activated microphone can end up causing distortions and annoying echoes while another person speaks. The camera is more delicate, although it is traditionally associated with that recent phenomenon baptized as “zoom fatigue” (“Zoom Fatigue”). People are even using Gitlab recorded video calls To pretend that it is busy.

The AI ​​boom for video calls. The big platforms to make video calls (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet) offer automated notes options using AI. There are also third -party solutions as Otter.AI that also enable these functions and raise a future in which meetings end up being very different from the current ones.

And soon, meetings with digital twins. Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, explained Recently that your company wants to offer the possibility that your “digital twin”, an IA assistant who can not only attend those meetings in your place, but also can intervene in it as if it were.

Everything you say will be recorded. This intrusion of AI at meetings has caused a new concern for attendees. Everything they say will be registered, recorded and transcribed. That can restrain freedom when expressing points of view or opinions, especially since those statements can then end up playing against who made them. Allie K. Miller, CEO of Open Machine, explained in Wapo how in her meetings her bot of AI to take notes until there are five minutes left to finish because that “people open more and the real questions come to light.”

Machine, gather for me. 55% of managers Recognize That has too many meetings a day, and 27% of employees share that opinion. There are more and more meetings – many They could have been an email– And the AI ​​can help soften its impact, but we go to a future potential in which no one goes to meetings in person except who must explain any topic. Who knows if in the end not even that person comes and everything is meetings full of bots.

Image | Surface

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