The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time. And it’s not some elitist mindset. It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better. They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo and all the receivers can poke holes in it. I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
They are "low information density" because that is not the point of the meeting.
Meetings are first and foremost about relationship management. You do not get to management and certainly not climb the management hierarchy if you do not at least implicitly feel this.
The actual meeting topic, while it can be relevant, is secondary. You establish and reinforce the pecking order, sense allegiance and subversion, or, feel out potential for reinforcing bonds or mitigating fallouts.
This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Now I have exaggerated all the above, but only to make the point more clear. As always it is not black and white.
And sometimes, it is worse. There are realy situations with managers that schedule meetings and calls because they are simply bored at work. These are the types that when the step into the car to go to a meeting, will always have to get on the phone with some rapportee to have a quick 'update' that might just last the lenght of the drive.
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
I also used to think that work meetings are low information density.
Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal!!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I went home in utter disbelief.
Currently, our parents' council is trying to organize a party for the children who will be going to school after summer. What should've been a TODO list where parents can write down what food they will bring and who will help with what escalated into 2 evenings of discussions, a Skype meeting, and a Whatsapp group where several fractions of parents have been fighting over whether T-Shirts should be printed to celebrate the end of kindergarten for over a week now.
There's this huge difference in quality between execs who work in writing and execs who NEVER write _anything_ down, which is surprisingly common. In my experience it correlates closely with toxic behaviour and I don't know why it's common for senior management in many orgs to allow people to operate in this style.
We can’t have people going back and forth over chat to work out an issue. I need to start a meeting so I can monologue the portion people already understand again and then I can complete the work because my portion is complete.
I already completed my work so I don’t need to change with these back and forth messages finding oversights or conflicts. I can just sit back and coast.
Also when it’s in chat everybody’s messages are the same size and you can’t just skip over them. By holding a meeting, I can disable everybody else’s mic and the chat or just talk over anybody else and win the discussion. By talking louder, my opinions are better and correct.
I don’t like when some random person causes me more work by speaking up in chat so that’s why we need to have meetings. Plus there’s a whole paper trail and it’s just messy and inconvenient.
> The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time.
I've been in my share of useless meetings.
However, I've been fortunate enough to be able to cut down the useless meetings at most of my jobs (with one exception, which was awful).
The problem now is that the AI note takers are turning even the good meetings into useless exercises. It's obvious that the AI note taker participants have no intention of participating during the meeting. Then 3 hours later you start getting follow-up questions that they should have asked in the meeting.
Everyone knows "This meeting could have been an e-mail" but fewer people recognize when "This 50-response e-mail conversation spanning 3 days could have been solved in the 30 minute meeting"
The root problem is people trying to transform their own work into async at the expense of forcing everyone else to accommodate them.
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
> They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
> It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better.
Higher ups like meetings too, everyone likes feeling better about themselves by showing status. Perhaps A.I will be able to relieve us of that eventually ...
Let's not pretend someone who sends an AI note taker, which also implies they have time to read notes taken by an AI of a meeting they couldn't find time to turn up for is someone lacking in time.
The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time.
They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.
I bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off (appearing to do work but they're actually playing Mario Kart).
In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting.
So they're likely buying themselves time to do the actually important work, while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance.
In my experience, at least, it's because a lot of "meetings" aren't actually meetings, they're presentations that are actually better consumed async after the fact, but historical precedent demands that everyone be invited to attend the live taping and emote and cheer politely.
I feel this is a symptom of poor meetings, where they are used for information exchange (which I think should come before the meeting) instead of collaboration and problem solving. You could save your time and a bunch of AI-generated notes you'll never read with the simple rule of "no agenda, no attenda". Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
Lots of talk here about writing being far superior to talking. This is entirely true. The thing you guys have to realize is that most people, like truly 80% of the population and probably some large subset of sw eng, hate reading and writing.
People see reading as a chore. The last full book they read was in an elective in college and even then they skimmed the spark notes. They see writing as a stupid thing they have to do, a word count they have to hit, not a communication mechanism at all. Seriously there are so many people out there like this. If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.
This is why chatGPT was trained to produce bullet points and why people do PowerPoints. A paragraph of the written word is scary to a percentage of the population, certainly most “normal people,” and definitely a large subset of engineers.
That’s just the way it is. But these are your colleagues you have to figure out how to communicate with them.
My company started to use an AI note taker for interviews. I was skeptical but had no say and decided to reserve my judgement. What surprised me was how many notes it produced. it will write hundreds of bullet points which ends up feeling exhaustive to try and review. In addition it makes lots of mistakes, maybe due to misinterpreting what a candidate said, accents/audio issues. So while I didn’t have to type during the interview, I still have to write my own overall impression anyways. I’ve found practically zero value from it, it just feels gimmicky.
What a nightmare. First a week full of useless undefined meetings, largely so that everyone can cover their asses, and now most don’t even bother turning up because they can automate covering their asses. I can see the prompt now… “let me know if there is something that affects me or which I need to know or take action on in order to cover my ass”.
I’m pretty strict. Meetings are for decisions and only parties to the decision are invited and attend. The agenda and decision required is circulated beforehand. Only the time to make the decision is scheduled. Need 10 minutes? Then the meeting is 10 minutes.
Catch-ups, get-togethers, presentations, status updates, and brainstorming sessions are labelled as such explicitly and are treated differently. The event and attendance needs to be justified.
Such a system works quite well. Perhaps worth mentioning that I also refuse to be CC’d on emails that do not require a response, just as I do not CC anyone if no response is required. I also require that people be left alone to work without interruption - how contrarian.
It just sucks if you have incompetent management that doesn’t allow or implement such things.
Finally, the meetings that should have been emails are being turned into emails for the organizers of such meetings. The only meetings that will survive are those where genuine discussion is warranted. If it’s simply an “all hands” address to your reports, it can be transcribed, summarized, and read in a fraction of the time.
I recently became an active user of some AI note-taking tools, and I've noticed that they are really great. As long as I set up the account, they send a robot to the meeting and write down almost everything, especially when there are people from different backgrounds and ACCENTS! God, they saved my life a thousand times, I would say. And reading summaries or even transcripts are so much more efficient than attending the meeting in person.
Reminds me of the scene in Real Genius.. where more and more students were leaving tape recorders on their desks to record a lecture and then eventually their professor left one playing a recorded lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
> [EU regulations] gives people a degree of control over their personal data, including the right to ask for it to be deleted.
The reason I think all-party consent laws are bad is the same reason I find the above sentence silly: If you say something out loud that is no longer your exclusive “data.” If you want to keep it secret either don’t say it, or say it under NDA or in a customary fashion such as telling a reporter off the record.
If you speak to me, I ought to have the right to memorialize it however I see fit (including note-taking with pencil, recording, and AI transcription) unless you and I agree otherwise (I do believe one should be bound to honor those commitments though).
Note: I live in an all-party consent state so I don’t record anything in actuality. But one should be free to — especially when dealing with corporate entities, who all force this recording unilaterally on everyone as a condition of ever speaking to them!
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
I'm going to buck the trend I see in this thread and say that the AI notetaker we've used has been helpful. After the meeting it sends a list of action items and meeting highlights that links to the timestamp in the meeting where we were talking about it in case we need to refer back. I've found it nice to have.
I think of the scene, in Real Genius, where a tape recording of a teacher lecturing is playing to an auditorium of students' tape recorders capturing the lecture.
Better still, of course, stop these foolish meetings.
I'd prefer to reduce meetings as much as the next guy but when I am in one, I take notes. Detailed notes. It helps make sense of what's being said and gives me a deeper understanding. I park the notes when done and can refresh my memory if I need a follow up.
The fact that I thought and wrote the notes is a very important part of this. Sure, an AI transcript might be useful to refer to but writing things down as the meeting goes is a great way to aid understanding.
These apps are cancer. Otter.ai for example, by default, will scrape the call's contacts, and email every single one, saying they can access the notes if they sign-up. A 300 person meeting, their spam bot sends out 300 emails. Totally captive audience, and the person who installed the notetaker is often none the wiser that it happened.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
My take on this... a small meeting among close people can have big payoffs. Much of the payoff is fast transfer due to total communication (body language, casual, back and forth) and then that loses it's power as the meeting gets less intimate. The unexpected face to face conversations and the overall environment are what makes in-office work well. Big meetings lose much of that power. Zoom meetings lose much more of that power. AI note taking sessions... might as well not even bother. Just send docs that of course nobody will read. This is just cargo-culting.
Each time I'm in a meeting with an AI note taker I am very tempted to prank the AI / person sending the AI. Maybe I should create a AI meeting mayhem bot that plays out some ridiculous scenario for the note taking AI to transcribe.
I can already hear the panicked phone call asking if Alice okay and how on earth could her whole house get swallowed by a sink hole without the wifi cutting out :P
So our company has reasonably liberal usage of Zoom's AI Assistant. To provide summaries etc. How good the summaries are is a matter of debate..... Sometimes they are fairly good, often they get small details wrong/confused. Overall I view them as a "this will remind us of high level conversation points if needed".
That being said, the notetaker is a supplementary component. It's never "in replace of a person". If someone sends an AI to my meeting instead of showing up themselves, I'm kicking it out.
If there is too much going on or too many meetings, learn to use meetings better. Learn to use emails. I'd much rather exchange a few emails than talk at an AI bot. Hell, I'll use my own AI to help me craft the email if I really feel its needed, but at least then I have the chance to make sure its right before I hit send.
In my opinion, sending an AI note taker to a meeting basically means that for the attendee, a recap email written by the meeting organizer would be enough - except that in my experience at least, most meeting organizers aren't writing these.
Best would be the meeting organizers to leverage their AI attendee to write a draft meeting recap and sending it out after review.
At my last company my manager never knew how to end a meeting. After we finished the topic of discussion he would start to ramble and ask people about their day, tell bad jokes, it was horrible. You could tell the guy was just desperate for social interaction and his subordinates were the only social interaction he had.
I block AI note takers from my meetings. Show up or read the notes taken afterwards (by a human, me). I’m not going to waste my time explaining the mistake your AI note taker made (misheard or misunderstood). I’m not going to deal with a “Why are we doing X when we previously said Y” which could either be the AI misunderstanding or a legit change of decision we made in the meeting (which you would know and would have been able to weigh in on if you had attended).
I’ve tested these tools a number of times, and if you were in the meeting, it’s easy to look at the notes and be impressed but reading the notes as someone who’s not in the meeting does not give the full picture as it often makes major/minor mistakes. If you were in the meeting, it’s easy to overlook or shrug off, but would be entirely confusing if you didn’t attend.
Wow looks like I'm only one who is happy not talking to bots at my job. I go to meetings to ask questions (maybe answer too). I guarantee if I don't care about the topic I won't read your AI notes email even harder than I won't attend or listen in the meeting. But in case of the meeting you could tell I didn't!
I completely understand sending a note taker to a bloated meeting where no participation is really expected of you anyways, but the anecdotes about AIs being sent to small meetings (even a 2 person interview the reporter scheduled for this very article!) in your stead is crazy.
Personally I don't mind a meeting that's either:
1) Informal, and short with up to 3ish close coworkers (as long as it doesn't start by someone sending the dreaded "hey, can you jump on a call?" message with no other context)
2) Published agenda well ahead of time, only relevant people are invited, some level of participation is required from all attendees, people are actually paying attention, and maybe most critically it's _well facilated_. Nothing more draining than meeting going off-topic and over-time because the facilitator doesn't feel comfortable telling that one guy to shut up.
I want to mildly off-topic point out that the article is arguing about the "loss of meaning" caused by automated note takers, only to be followed by an AI summary of the comments section.
I work at a large multinational bank. We have zoom, but we have permantly disabled the ability to record, transcribe, or use AI for any meeting. It's been like this since the beginning and there are no signs of changing. Sure, the writer of this article is going to experience AI in his bubble, but we aren't. Things get forgotten every 5 seconds around here. For some of us that's not changing. Although it is a little reassuring that I never have to worry about an AI agent joining one of my calls, lol.
On the other hand, I have great difficulty following who speaks what during an online meeting. I think that most people speech arent clearly transmitted, well as a justification looking the live caption, it also contains a lot of mistake
Then they should host the meetings on irc! (not completely kidding.)
Or maybe there's an opportunity for someone to create an "interop environment" where AIs representing diverse persons' agendas within an organisation can come together and agree on outcomes and goals on behalf of their sponsors (maybe not completely serious, but ...)
Yeah, I know TFA is just notetaking but that shouldn't stop us from thinking ahead, right? The possibilities for cost-cutting in middle management are spectacular!
How can anyone be sure this story is at all true? Is it taken from an anecdotal story told to a WaPo reporter by a large investor in AI seeking to hype up the ability of AI to take good notes in a meeting, to create a marketing buzz around AI and draw in more investors? The naive credence given to this story in the comment section is probably not justified.
What counts as “attending” when AI is present?
If a bot represents you in silence, is that equivalent to skipping the meeting—or attending? This raises deeper questions about participation equity and presence.
I use AI to take meeting notes too, and it really makes things easier. I can focus more on listening. But sometimes it changes the vibe a bit, like we’re all just talking to a bunch of bots. Now I only use it when I’m leading the meeting, and I always ask if others are okay with it. The tool is helpful, but real human connection still matters.
It’s occurred to me that scrum masters are not long for this world at all. It would only take one engineer to suck up their entire organization’s meetings and then train an AI scrum master on them. Surprised we haven’t seen a Y-combinator company do it yet.
The worst is when someone uses these, blindly trusts the output, and then sends out an email after the meeting with a list of hallucinations that everyone supposedly "agreed to".
We have a lot of sensitive meetings these days, so we aren't recording them. We have had to put guard rails in place to keep people from sending their AI note-takers to the meetings because they don't listen to our CEO when he says not to do that. Few people in our org worry about the security implications of ingesting sensitive information with these tools.
I read this from a video transcript on National Law Review [1]:
> The question becomes, where is it saved? Who has access to it? Is it secure? Is it being disclosed? All the same kinds of questions that organizations face when they are processing sensitive personal data or sensitive company data. That's just to kick it off.
But the wapo article says it even better:
> 'Nothing will be forgotten'
That is not always a feature with meetings, and the more you read the article the more vapid most of the responses here ("meetings dumb. me no have to go now") become.
What TF is "AI notetaker" you need to send in? All our Teams meetings get recorded and all invitees get the link to the recording and a short AI-generated summary.
A bit ironic that the flood of productivity, communication and project management tools in the past 2 decades were supposed to fix the “meeting problem”, and yet it won’t go away.
Considering that most meeting software have built-in call record and transcription features, it is less wasteful and less distracting to automatically send the artefacts to all participants.
Last year, after many years working remote, I joined a company with heavy in-office culture. I grumbled about all the commute, but now I am really really happy.
I haven't had an useful meeting in years. All the important collaboration and decision making has happened organically in text chat, which is great because it's all searchable and dated, and I do refer to that a lot. In fact they recently moved my main collaborator from another building into the next desk and we agreed to keep the work stuff in chat as much as possible so it isn't lost. So we chitchat about our kids but still type out our debate about the best version launch date.
Every meeting in person or via Zoom I have been in has been either an useless sales pitch, grandstanding by some manager, brown-nosing by some upstart or some other form of toxic socialization, scheming or conspiracy. I detest all those and avoid them, which is probably why I've become kind of an unpromotable pariah, which is ok, as a promotion would mean attending more of them.
I hope this finally ends meetings. Pretty much nothing ever needs to be a meeting. Everything can be decided async. Extroverts are the only ones demanding a meeting to hear themselves talk. I have yet to experience a single compelling remote meeting.
> He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
I hate this. For lots of reasons but mainly privacy. If the call is being recorded that's visible for all to see. If some dick is recording my every word with AI I'll never know. It's going to stifle discussions, especially more informal small group ones, and eventually the only solution will be dragging everyone back to the office because clearly people can't be trusted.
The worst thing about those "note taker" bots on video and voice calls isn't when your employer uses one internally -- where there might be awareness and at least nominal consent -- but when you get ambushed by one, at the start of a call, outside that company-internal context.
For example, on calls with customers/partners, or with a recruiter, or for a job interview.
Thanks, fellow human. You probably just sold out my voice and likeness -- and, if I don't notice and disconnect immediately, the content of our conversation, and any info I might share -- to some ruthless sociopath techbro startup. Which will use and abuse and leak the data. Even though they don't have rights. And it's actually a felony to be recording calls without consent where I live.
Brutal truth: we invited AI into meetings for efficiency, and now we’re discovering just how much of us it captures. What hit me is how quickly “AI assistant” can become “silent witness.” If organizations don’t set clear guardrails, convenience turns into compliance liability. We need transparency protocols—who sees what, why, and when.
https://archive.ph/ejC53
The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time. And it’s not some elitist mindset. It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better. They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo and all the receivers can poke holes in it. I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
They are "low information density" because that is not the point of the meeting.
Meetings are first and foremost about relationship management. You do not get to management and certainly not climb the management hierarchy if you do not at least implicitly feel this.
The actual meeting topic, while it can be relevant, is secondary. You establish and reinforce the pecking order, sense allegiance and subversion, or, feel out potential for reinforcing bonds or mitigating fallouts.
This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Now I have exaggerated all the above, but only to make the point more clear. As always it is not black and white.
And sometimes, it is worse. There are realy situations with managers that schedule meetings and calls because they are simply bored at work. These are the types that when the step into the car to go to a meeting, will always have to get on the phone with some rapportee to have a quick 'update' that might just last the lenght of the drive.
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
I also used to think that work meetings are low information density.
Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal!!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I went home in utter disbelief.
Currently, our parents' council is trying to organize a party for the children who will be going to school after summer. What should've been a TODO list where parents can write down what food they will bring and who will help with what escalated into 2 evenings of discussions, a Skype meeting, and a Whatsapp group where several fractions of parents have been fighting over whether T-Shirts should be printed to celebrate the end of kindergarten for over a week now.
There's this huge difference in quality between execs who work in writing and execs who NEVER write _anything_ down, which is surprisingly common. In my experience it correlates closely with toxic behaviour and I don't know why it's common for senior management in many orgs to allow people to operate in this style.
This is it.
We can’t have people going back and forth over chat to work out an issue. I need to start a meeting so I can monologue the portion people already understand again and then I can complete the work because my portion is complete.
I already completed my work so I don’t need to change with these back and forth messages finding oversights or conflicts. I can just sit back and coast.
Also when it’s in chat everybody’s messages are the same size and you can’t just skip over them. By holding a meeting, I can disable everybody else’s mic and the chat or just talk over anybody else and win the discussion. By talking louder, my opinions are better and correct.
I don’t like when some random person causes me more work by speaking up in chat so that’s why we need to have meetings. Plus there’s a whole paper trail and it’s just messy and inconvenient.
> The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time.
I've been in my share of useless meetings.
However, I've been fortunate enough to be able to cut down the useless meetings at most of my jobs (with one exception, which was awful).
The problem now is that the AI note takers are turning even the good meetings into useless exercises. It's obvious that the AI note taker participants have no intention of participating during the meeting. Then 3 hours later you start getting follow-up questions that they should have asked in the meeting.
Everyone knows "This meeting could have been an e-mail" but fewer people recognize when "This 50-response e-mail conversation spanning 3 days could have been solved in the 30 minute meeting"
The root problem is people trying to transform their own work into async at the expense of forcing everyone else to accommodate them.
> because that authority is harder to question
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
> They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
> It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better.
Higher ups like meetings too, everyone likes feeling better about themselves by showing status. Perhaps A.I will be able to relieve us of that eventually ...
Let's not pretend someone who sends an AI note taker, which also implies they have time to read notes taken by an AI of a meeting they couldn't find time to turn up for is someone lacking in time.
The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time.
They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.
I bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off (appearing to do work but they're actually playing Mario Kart).
In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting.
So they're likely buying themselves time to do the actually important work, while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance.
In my experience, at least, it's because a lot of "meetings" aren't actually meetings, they're presentations that are actually better consumed async after the fact, but historical precedent demands that everyone be invited to attend the live taping and emote and cheer politely.
I feel this is a symptom of poor meetings, where they are used for information exchange (which I think should come before the meeting) instead of collaboration and problem solving. You could save your time and a bunch of AI-generated notes you'll never read with the simple rule of "no agenda, no attenda". Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
Lots of talk here about writing being far superior to talking. This is entirely true. The thing you guys have to realize is that most people, like truly 80% of the population and probably some large subset of sw eng, hate reading and writing.
People see reading as a chore. The last full book they read was in an elective in college and even then they skimmed the spark notes. They see writing as a stupid thing they have to do, a word count they have to hit, not a communication mechanism at all. Seriously there are so many people out there like this. If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.
This is why chatGPT was trained to produce bullet points and why people do PowerPoints. A paragraph of the written word is scary to a percentage of the population, certainly most “normal people,” and definitely a large subset of engineers.
That’s just the way it is. But these are your colleagues you have to figure out how to communicate with them.
My company started to use an AI note taker for interviews. I was skeptical but had no say and decided to reserve my judgement. What surprised me was how many notes it produced. it will write hundreds of bullet points which ends up feeling exhaustive to try and review. In addition it makes lots of mistakes, maybe due to misinterpreting what a candidate said, accents/audio issues. So while I didn’t have to type during the interview, I still have to write my own overall impression anyways. I’ve found practically zero value from it, it just feels gimmicky.
What a nightmare. First a week full of useless undefined meetings, largely so that everyone can cover their asses, and now most don’t even bother turning up because they can automate covering their asses. I can see the prompt now… “let me know if there is something that affects me or which I need to know or take action on in order to cover my ass”.
I’m pretty strict. Meetings are for decisions and only parties to the decision are invited and attend. The agenda and decision required is circulated beforehand. Only the time to make the decision is scheduled. Need 10 minutes? Then the meeting is 10 minutes.
Catch-ups, get-togethers, presentations, status updates, and brainstorming sessions are labelled as such explicitly and are treated differently. The event and attendance needs to be justified.
Such a system works quite well. Perhaps worth mentioning that I also refuse to be CC’d on emails that do not require a response, just as I do not CC anyone if no response is required. I also require that people be left alone to work without interruption - how contrarian.
It just sucks if you have incompetent management that doesn’t allow or implement such things.
Finally, the meetings that should have been emails are being turned into emails for the organizers of such meetings. The only meetings that will survive are those where genuine discussion is warranted. If it’s simply an “all hands” address to your reports, it can be transcribed, summarized, and read in a fraction of the time.
I recently became an active user of some AI note-taking tools, and I've noticed that they are really great. As long as I set up the account, they send a robot to the meeting and write down almost everything, especially when there are people from different backgrounds and ACCENTS! God, they saved my life a thousand times, I would say. And reading summaries or even transcripts are so much more efficient than attending the meeting in person.
Reminds me of this scene from Real Genius: https://youtu.be/wB1X4o-MV6o
Reminds me of the scene in Real Genius.. where more and more students were leaving tape recorders on their desks to record a lecture and then eventually their professor left one playing a recorded lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
> [EU regulations] gives people a degree of control over their personal data, including the right to ask for it to be deleted.
The reason I think all-party consent laws are bad is the same reason I find the above sentence silly: If you say something out loud that is no longer your exclusive “data.” If you want to keep it secret either don’t say it, or say it under NDA or in a customary fashion such as telling a reporter off the record.
If you speak to me, I ought to have the right to memorialize it however I see fit (including note-taking with pencil, recording, and AI transcription) unless you and I agree otherwise (I do believe one should be bound to honor those commitments though).
Note: I live in an all-party consent state so I don’t record anything in actuality. But one should be free to — especially when dealing with corporate entities, who all force this recording unilaterally on everyone as a condition of ever speaking to them!
You don't even need AI. Just a bot that waits until the end of the meeting and then says, "Nothing from me. Thanks everyone."
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
I'm going to buck the trend I see in this thread and say that the AI notetaker we've used has been helpful. After the meeting it sends a list of action items and meeting highlights that links to the timestamp in the meeting where we were talking about it in case we need to refer back. I've found it nice to have.
How long before the AIs are leasing the meetings?
I think of the scene, in Real Genius, where a tape recording of a teacher lecturing is playing to an auditorium of students' tape recorders capturing the lecture.
Better still, of course, stop these foolish meetings.
I'd prefer to reduce meetings as much as the next guy but when I am in one, I take notes. Detailed notes. It helps make sense of what's being said and gives me a deeper understanding. I park the notes when done and can refresh my memory if I need a follow up.
The fact that I thought and wrote the notes is a very important part of this. Sure, an AI transcript might be useful to refer to but writing things down as the meeting goes is a great way to aid understanding.
This is a complete non-issue if you use meetings to make gather feedback and make decisions. Send notes on the decision in an email after the meeting.
If you use meetings for something useful, then AI notes won’t be of any value anyway.
These apps are cancer. Otter.ai for example, by default, will scrape the call's contacts, and email every single one, saying they can access the notes if they sign-up. A 300 person meeting, their spam bot sends out 300 emails. Totally captive audience, and the person who installed the notetaker is often none the wiser that it happened.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.
When the Zoom CEO gave that outlandish interview to TheVerge about the future of Zoom being agents attending meetings for you…
Naively assuming that everyone wouldn’t just have their agent attend all of their meetings. Turning Zoom into a 5 second diff over an api.
My take on this... a small meeting among close people can have big payoffs. Much of the payoff is fast transfer due to total communication (body language, casual, back and forth) and then that loses it's power as the meeting gets less intimate. The unexpected face to face conversations and the overall environment are what makes in-office work well. Big meetings lose much of that power. Zoom meetings lose much more of that power. AI note taking sessions... might as well not even bother. Just send docs that of course nobody will read. This is just cargo-culting.
There should be a common text system to send messages to your coworkers. It would be great if it worked universally across the Internet.
Someone needs to invent some form of electronic mail.
Nothing says "this meeting should have been an email" like programmatically reducing it to plain text.
Each time I'm in a meeting with an AI note taker I am very tempted to prank the AI / person sending the AI. Maybe I should create a AI meeting mayhem bot that plays out some ridiculous scenario for the note taking AI to transcribe.
I can already hear the panicked phone call asking if Alice okay and how on earth could her whole house get swallowed by a sink hole without the wifi cutting out :P
So our company has reasonably liberal usage of Zoom's AI Assistant. To provide summaries etc. How good the summaries are is a matter of debate..... Sometimes they are fairly good, often they get small details wrong/confused. Overall I view them as a "this will remind us of high level conversation points if needed".
That being said, the notetaker is a supplementary component. It's never "in replace of a person". If someone sends an AI to my meeting instead of showing up themselves, I'm kicking it out.
If there is too much going on or too many meetings, learn to use meetings better. Learn to use emails. I'd much rather exchange a few emails than talk at an AI bot. Hell, I'll use my own AI to help me craft the email if I really feel its needed, but at least then I have the chance to make sure its right before I hit send.
In my opinion, sending an AI note taker to a meeting basically means that for the attendee, a recap email written by the meeting organizer would be enough - except that in my experience at least, most meeting organizers aren't writing these.
Best would be the meeting organizers to leverage their AI attendee to write a draft meeting recap and sending it out after review.
At my last company my manager never knew how to end a meeting. After we finished the topic of discussion he would start to ramble and ask people about their day, tell bad jokes, it was horrible. You could tell the guy was just desperate for social interaction and his subordinates were the only social interaction he had.
I block AI note takers from my meetings. Show up or read the notes taken afterwards (by a human, me). I’m not going to waste my time explaining the mistake your AI note taker made (misheard or misunderstood). I’m not going to deal with a “Why are we doing X when we previously said Y” which could either be the AI misunderstanding or a legit change of decision we made in the meeting (which you would know and would have been able to weigh in on if you had attended).
I’ve tested these tools a number of times, and if you were in the meeting, it’s easy to look at the notes and be impressed but reading the notes as someone who’s not in the meeting does not give the full picture as it often makes major/minor mistakes. If you were in the meeting, it’s easy to overlook or shrug off, but would be entirely confusing if you didn’t attend.
Wow looks like I'm only one who is happy not talking to bots at my job. I go to meetings to ask questions (maybe answer too). I guarantee if I don't care about the topic I won't read your AI notes email even harder than I won't attend or listen in the meeting. But in case of the meeting you could tell I didn't!
I completely understand sending a note taker to a bloated meeting where no participation is really expected of you anyways, but the anecdotes about AIs being sent to small meetings (even a 2 person interview the reporter scheduled for this very article!) in your stead is crazy.
Personally I don't mind a meeting that's either:
1) Informal, and short with up to 3ish close coworkers (as long as it doesn't start by someone sending the dreaded "hey, can you jump on a call?" message with no other context)
2) Published agenda well ahead of time, only relevant people are invited, some level of participation is required from all attendees, people are actually paying attention, and maybe most critically it's _well facilated_. Nothing more draining than meeting going off-topic and over-time because the facilitator doesn't feel comfortable telling that one guy to shut up.
If anyone is interested in running their own meeting bot (doubtful aha), check out our open source repositories: https://github.com/Meeting-Baas
Also we provide on-prem installation so meeting data doesn't leave your company :))
I was recently in a 1:1 meeting where the person I met with had 3 separate AI note takers join. What in tarnation?!?
Newbies! I don't even bother with note-taking. If something important was said during the meeting, someone will let me know.
(Only for meetings I'm not an active participant, of course. Filler meetings... which is most of them).
I want to mildly off-topic point out that the article is arguing about the "loss of meaning" caused by automated note takers, only to be followed by an AI summary of the comments section.
Do as I say, not as I do.
So how long until the first meeting were all the attendees are AI and the presenter is also AI?
I work at a large multinational bank. We have zoom, but we have permantly disabled the ability to record, transcribe, or use AI for any meeting. It's been like this since the beginning and there are no signs of changing. Sure, the writer of this article is going to experience AI in his bubble, but we aren't. Things get forgotten every 5 seconds around here. For some of us that's not changing. Although it is a little reassuring that I never have to worry about an AI agent joining one of my calls, lol.
On the other hand, I have great difficulty following who speaks what during an online meeting. I think that most people speech arent clearly transmitted, well as a justification looking the live caption, it also contains a lot of mistake
Then they should host the meetings on irc! (not completely kidding.)
Or maybe there's an opportunity for someone to create an "interop environment" where AIs representing diverse persons' agendas within an organisation can come together and agree on outcomes and goals on behalf of their sponsors (maybe not completely serious, but ...)
Yeah, I know TFA is just notetaking but that shouldn't stop us from thinking ahead, right? The possibilities for cost-cutting in middle management are spectacular!
More remote-work rage bait.
This allows folks who do not need actually contribute to a meeting to catch up on the content at a time that suits them later.
Sounds like a very efficient use of time to me.
> “We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
How can anyone be sure this story is at all true? Is it taken from an anecdotal story told to a WaPo reporter by a large investor in AI seeking to hype up the ability of AI to take good notes in a meeting, to create a marketing buzz around AI and draw in more investors? The naive credence given to this story in the comment section is probably not justified.
What counts as “attending” when AI is present? If a bot represents you in silence, is that equivalent to skipping the meeting—or attending? This raises deeper questions about participation equity and presence.
I use AI to take meeting notes too, and it really makes things easier. I can focus more on listening. But sometimes it changes the vibe a bit, like we’re all just talking to a bunch of bots. Now I only use it when I’m leading the meeting, and I always ask if others are okay with it. The tool is helpful, but real human connection still matters.
It’s occurred to me that scrum masters are not long for this world at all. It would only take one engineer to suck up their entire organization’s meetings and then train an AI scrum master on them. Surprised we haven’t seen a Y-combinator company do it yet.
Arranging more meetings is not how you move a project forwards. This is a disease.
This is like the adversarial interoperability version of "this meeting could have been an email".
I've always struggled with note keeping while actively absorbing information. Unfortunately, it is either/or for my brain.
I think with new crop of tools the product of my dreams, a vision-audio notekeeping app, will be possible.
The worst is when someone uses these, blindly trusts the output, and then sends out an email after the meeting with a list of hallucinations that everyone supposedly "agreed to".
We have a lot of sensitive meetings these days, so we aren't recording them. We have had to put guard rails in place to keep people from sending their AI note-takers to the meetings because they don't listen to our CEO when he says not to do that. Few people in our org worry about the security implications of ingesting sensitive information with these tools.
I read this from a video transcript on National Law Review [1]:
> The question becomes, where is it saved? Who has access to it? Is it secure? Is it being disclosed? All the same kinds of questions that organizations face when they are processing sensitive personal data or sensitive company data. That's just to kick it off.
But the wapo article says it even better:
> 'Nothing will be forgotten'
That is not always a feature with meetings, and the more you read the article the more vapid most of the responses here ("meetings dumb. me no have to go now") become.
[1] https://natlawreview.com/article/we-get-privacy-work-assessi...
What TF is "AI notetaker" you need to send in? All our Teams meetings get recorded and all invitees get the link to the recording and a short AI-generated summary.
A bit ironic that the flood of productivity, communication and project management tools in the past 2 decades were supposed to fix the “meeting problem”, and yet it won’t go away.
Considering that most meeting software have built-in call record and transcription features, it is less wasteful and less distracting to automatically send the artefacts to all participants.
Last year, after many years working remote, I joined a company with heavy in-office culture. I grumbled about all the commute, but now I am really really happy.
Given just how completely empty of real substance and importance 90% of 90% of all group meetings are, this is one use of AI I can fully applaud.
I haven't had an useful meeting in years. All the important collaboration and decision making has happened organically in text chat, which is great because it's all searchable and dated, and I do refer to that a lot. In fact they recently moved my main collaborator from another building into the next desk and we agreed to keep the work stuff in chat as much as possible so it isn't lost. So we chitchat about our kids but still type out our debate about the best version launch date.
Every meeting in person or via Zoom I have been in has been either an useless sales pitch, grandstanding by some manager, brown-nosing by some upstart or some other form of toxic socialization, scheming or conspiracy. I detest all those and avoid them, which is probably why I've become kind of an unpromotable pariah, which is ok, as a promotion would mean attending more of them.
And since AI is now being used to subvert the power and control of management, it's going to be banned.
Similar like that saying with politics - if you don't proactively replace yourself with AI, then you will be replaced by AI.
I am average joe. But maybe if we can teach only AI to take notes from defined person only? saves times right?
I never skip any meetings. Why should I miss a chance to twiddle my thumbs that I get paid for?
I hope this finally ends meetings. Pretty much nothing ever needs to be a meeting. Everything can be decided async. Extroverts are the only ones demanding a meeting to hear themselves talk. I have yet to experience a single compelling remote meeting.
> He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
Why do you even have a call with 16 people in it?
popular news reported in the US "Zoom Meeting Participants are Sending AI bots Instead"
compare and contrast the two headlines
Nothing from my end, thanks.
Some people have multiple ones.
I hate this. For lots of reasons but mainly privacy. If the call is being recorded that's visible for all to see. If some dick is recording my every word with AI I'll never know. It's going to stifle discussions, especially more informal small group ones, and eventually the only solution will be dragging everyone back to the office because clearly people can't be trusted.
The worst thing about those "note taker" bots on video and voice calls isn't when your employer uses one internally -- where there might be awareness and at least nominal consent -- but when you get ambushed by one, at the start of a call, outside that company-internal context.
For example, on calls with customers/partners, or with a recruiter, or for a job interview.
Thanks, fellow human. You probably just sold out my voice and likeness -- and, if I don't notice and disconnect immediately, the content of our conversation, and any info I might share -- to some ruthless sociopath techbro startup. Which will use and abuse and leak the data. Even though they don't have rights. And it's actually a felony to be recording calls without consent where I live.
Brutal truth: we invited AI into meetings for efficiency, and now we’re discovering just how much of us it captures. What hit me is how quickly “AI assistant” can become “silent witness.” If organizations don’t set clear guardrails, convenience turns into compliance liability. We need transparency protocols—who sees what, why, and when.
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