AI in Meetings

Everyone has survived at least one meeting that could have been an email. In fact, bad meetings are one of the most common pain points in large organizations. Bad meetings are a symptom of wider organizational dysfunction. And we’ve known since the 60s!
But still they persist. And now with the advent of AI, we turn to these new tools with fresh hope. Maybe, just maybe, they can help relieve the burden?

Sorry to rain on your parade, but AI won’t transform your business, or your meetings. Effective meetings, and effective organizations depend on the same things: The Right People, using the Right Process, supported by the Right Tech IN THAT ORDER! AI only hits that last part. We humans still need to handle those first two well.

That is not to say that AI cannot help us make more effective meetings. For a meeting to be effective, we need to pick the Right People. We also need to enable them to make that meeting productive. Maybe Sally is a fast-twitch thinker. She might spark with new ideas every moment, but get lost in the details. AI can help you tailor a message for Sally. Get her just enough details to contain her rapid brainstorming to the feasible arena.

Sometimes getting the most out of a meeting means ensuring you don’t lose the action items for follow up. After all, if nothing changes after the meeting, was it worth it? But if you have to choose between taking notes, and engaging in the dialog, are you being as effective as you could be? AI transcription and Meeting summarization is built into MS Teams nowadays. It might not be perfect, but it does a marvelous job at capturing Action items. Just be sure to actually declare it when an action item does come up.

But perhaps the most impactful way AI can help us improve our meetings is this: AI can help us improve ourselves! You can leverage the Recording, and AI summary to retrospect on previous meetings. With a good AI you can analyze new angle, and approaches. You can see what people respond well to, or don’t. With some clever adaptation, you can use old meeting recordings like game-day footage. This post-meeting review will help you improve the human elements of effective meetings!

Now, there are certainly some hurdles to using AI in meetings. But if we keep our focus on the Right Things, and In the Right Order, we can definitely improve. AI won’t transform your meetings. But if you leverage it well, it can help you make them more effective!