How uninvited attendees are plaguing our virtual meetings

The next time you’re in an online meeting, I want you to take a closer look at the list of attendees. In addition to Steve from marketing and Jenny from finance, you might be surprised to find some new names lurking that you didn’t invite.

No, I’m not talking about international spies who can be bothered to infiltrate your weekly sales updates, I mean the new breed of AI note-takers that are beginning to invade the workplace and attend virtual meetings.

Consider what cultural message you’re sending to colleagues when you substitute yourself for AI in meetings.Credit: iStock

Apps with earthy names like Fireflies, Otter and Granola are appearing alongside their owners to silently take notes, summarise the agenda into bullet points and capture next actions on Zoom calls and Teams meetings. And now, a growing number of workers are beginning to send AI note-takers in their place to attend meetings they don’t have time for.

You might have noticed that they are suddenly everywhere, with some recent meetings I’ve logged in to having more robots attending than humans. The entire AI note-taking market globally is expected to grow by around 20 per cent each year over the next decade.

On the surface, it sounds innocent enough, but it’s time we all need to stop and discuss this new trend before we mindlessly embrace it. I’m all for adopting useful new technologies, but there are both ethical and legal questions we need to address.

The first has to do with etiquette and culture. At a bare minimum, you should always ask a meeting host for permission and inform participants that everything they say will be recorded and summarised. Meetings are designed to be open and collaborative, and sometimes, the presence of AI note-takers silently analysing every word is unwanted and unproductive.

Let’s slow down before letting AI automatically into our lives – and meetings – until we’ve properly thought it all through.

If you think that sending an AI note-taker to meetings you don’t wish to attend is a genius move to save you time, stop to consider what cultural message you’re sending to colleagues. There is more to the art of meeting than just ticking through agenda items, and you’re loudly hinting that this meeting isn’t worth your time.

AI note-taking also has the potential to easily spiral into a nightmare. Last year, American engineer Alex Bilzerian reported that an AI note-taker had recorded a call he had with venture capitalists. After the meeting had finished, it automatically emailed him the transcript, “including hours of their private conversations afterwards, where they discussed intimate, confidential details about their business”.

He’s not alone, with dozens of people sharing horror stories of what happens when useful technology backfires. One detailed how a friend’s private conversation about his psychedelic drug experience in the “small talk” before a client joined a meeting was promptly emailed around his entire company.

There are serious legal ramifications to this new technology, too, with a whole fresh minefield of privacy rules to navigate. If your company doesn’t have a policy around AI note-takers joining your meetings, take this as your gentle prompt to create one.

AI is advancing at such a pace it can be difficult to keep up with, but rather than blindly saying yes to each new advancement, we need to think carefully about the ethical, cultural and legal ramifications.

In the right context, having an AI note-taker assist you in keeping track of meeting topics and next steps can be super beneficial. However, let’s slow down before letting AI automatically into our lives – and meetings – until we’ve properly thought it all through.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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