How workers can skip meetings thanks to AI and avoid the dreaded ‘Zoom face’

Artificial intelligence is Zooming into meetings. But while many people approach the technology with caution, it offers a chance to bolster productivity and, oddly, for workers to be more present.

Colette Stallbaumer - general manager of Microsoft 365 and future of work -says meetings aren’t going anywhere, they are just getting smarter.

The millions of workers sent home during the pandemic inadvertently generated another illness that was just as infectious and even more difficult to shake off than Covid-19. The “Zoom face” – that phenomenon that suggests we are hyper-aware of our appearances thanks to video calls – may sound trivial, but it has become a subject of intense research among academics in the US, Europe and locally.

Before the pandemic if someone wanted to communicate with you remotely, he or she would pick up the phone and use it as it was ­traditionally designed – to make a voice call. Apple’s Facetime may have been around for much of the past decade, but it was still a novelty for many users.

Most companies had not even heard of Zoom; Microsoft Teams was still in its relative infancy; and don’t even mention Webex.

Video calls were clunky and inefficient but they quickly became the new black as employees were confined to their homes. For non-work-related matters, the video links were seen as a window back to normality – even if a little strange.

Remember those remote trivia nights or awkward after-work drinks when people ­appeared on our screens like the opening titles of the Brady Bunch, confined to their tiny Zoom boxes.

During the pandemic, video calls offered a window into normality, even if participants looked like the cast from the Brady Bunch.

Those Zoom exercises were essential in maintaining connections, and for companies specialising in video tech it paid off handsomely, with Zoom shares surging from $US67.28 in January 2020 to a peak of $559 by October that year.

The video calls continue – even as hybrid working or working in the office becomes the new normal – but they are a little more complex. For example, in group meetings, some people turn off their cameras and mute their microphones, leaving hosts speaking to the equivalent of a cosmic black hole.

There is of course a reason for this; Zoom can suck the energy from participants.

Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the virtual human interaction lab at Stanford University, says video calls can be exhausting. He cites the “excessive eye contact” involved; the issues of people seeing themselves on screen; and how virtual meetings reduce our usual mobility.

“Videoconferencing is a good thing for remote communication, but just think about the medium – just because you can use video doesn’t mean you have to,” Bailenson says.

RMIT has also studied the effects of video chats, lumping these in with the “digital overload” that has contributed to Australia’s flat lining productivity. The demands on employees to constantly watch themselves as performers is exhausting, the university states. So, if advances in tech got us into this problem, it’s no surprise that tech is offering to help us out of it, largely thanks to artificial intelligence.

While Australians are approaching generative AI platforms with a mix of caution and excitement, the technology offers employees a chance to bolster productivity while outsourcing tedious, performance-sapping tasks to virtual assistants.

On November 1, Microsoft will unleash its AI Copilot more broadly across businesses via its Microsoft 365 suite of products. It will be embedded into popular programs such as Teams, Word, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. Microsoft has been quietly trialling the technology with a group of Australian companies, including NAB, AGL, Bupa, Suncorp and Rest Super, with the aim of curbing digital overload, or as Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Microsoft 365 and future of work, puts it, “digital debt”.

The technology can harness the power of AI to create “meetingless meetings”. It means not every employee has to attend a meeting or if they do and have to split their focus with performing another task, they can be brought up to speed via an AI-powered virtual assistant. Google and Zoom have also launched similar offerings.

It works like this: you miss a meeting but it is recorded, you simply ask questions, such “what were the topics discussed”, “do I have any action items” or simply “summarise this meeting”. Copilot costs $US30 ($47.1) per employee, per month, and with millions of workers globally subscribed to Microsoft 365, it is set to make the company billions.

“What our data says is people are attending 60-minute meetings to get two minutes of insight or the two minutes of information that they need,” Stallbaumer tells The Deal when we meet with her in New York – face to face, and not via video call.

“With Copilot, you can extract that really important data or salient thing you’re trying to catch up on or maybe one data point in an hour-long discussion.”

She stresses that the technology won’t replace meetings. After all, there still needs to be a host and others present; employees can’t outsource their duties completely to a bot.

“Meetings aren’t going anywhere,” Stallbaumer says. “They’re a key part of how we work and collaborate. There is a woman on my leadership team who sits in the UK. She’s not often in all of our real time meetings. But because she’s using Copilot, by the time my morning starts, she’s caught up on what happened in my afternoon, and feeling like she’s not missing out.

“But I do think we had something like the pendulum shift in what happened during the pandemic, where we had a hammer and nail and everything became a meeting. Right now I think there’s an opportunity with Copilot to help people find more focus.”

AGL head of employee technology Grace Russo agrees, saying the energy giant’s focus on using an AI-powered assistant will initially be on users who are heavy content producers or leaders who typically have weeks filled with back-to-back and conflicting meetings.

“We have embraced flexible work models over the past few years, which has been positive on multiple fronts,” Russo says. “However it has also meant that employees are spending more time managing chats, emails and in meetings in order to stay connected.”

Russo says AI has a “huge potential” to make employees more efficient, productive and to “liberate them from the mundane to focus on higher-value tasks”.

Introducing automation into meetings is not entirely new. Voice to text software has been around for years, albeit with varying degrees of accuracy. With AI, the quality of transcripts has improved significantly in the past 12 to 18 months.

Otter.ai - launched by Sam Liang and Yun Fi as AISense in 2016 - allows a user to click on a word in a transcript, which then takes them to that part of an audio recording - to double check accuracy. Like Microsoft, Otter.ai has introduced a virtual assistant to allow people to probe meetings via verbal prompts, removing the need to take copious notes and focus more on listening and generally paying attention.

But with all that corporate and sensitive information available at employees’ fingertips, it has created a greater need for regulation, with governments scrambling to tame the use of AI with fears it poses risks, such as the spread of misinformation, wrongful surveillance and the development of advanced weaponry by governments and terrorists.

Research group Economist Intelligence Unit says the EU is likely to become the leader in AI regulation just as its laws on device charging cables led to USB-C becoming the new standard. Meanwhile, the US is likely to take a lighter approach, advocating self- regulation in an effort to not stifle innovation.

Microsoft’s Stallbaumer is open to rules governing AI’s use: “We strongly believe in regulation. We think that needs to happen and that’s why we’re involved, talking to our government and governments all over the world about how to make it safe.”.

Jared Lynch travelled to New York as a guest of Microsoft