PCPRO October 2015
Barry Collins is available for meetings between 7pm and 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays, chiefly in the pub. Book in with his AI assistant at barry@ mediabc.co.uk. @bazzacollins
One of the many things I don’t miss about working in an office is the meetings. When I edited PC Pro, at least half my day was spent in meeting rooms. Meetings with my publisher, my team, the ads team, marketing, subscriptions, press briefings. I once had a meeting where the athlete Roger Black brought doughnuts to my desk. This was the point I decided to give up drinking.
That was getting on for 15 years ago. Nowadays, you’re probably not shuttling from one glass cubicle to another, but sat in front of your screen, jockeying between Teams, Zoom and Google Meet. Maybe a Slack Huddle or two in between. You don’t have to make polite conversation by the watercooler or loom like Reggie Kray at the door to hurry up an over-running meeting in your booked room, but the meetings drain is still real. It’s just moved online.
Little wonder, then, that people are increasingly tempted to send an AI proxy to their meetings. Services such as Otter, Teams and Google all allow you to log into a meeting, switch off the camera and have an AI assistant transcribe the meeting, delivering a summary of all the key takeaways and action points once it’s over. Why bother going at all?
Otter.ai plans to take this even further. It already allows you to have an AI assistant sit in on your behalf, able to field questions. And before long, the company hopes the AI will be capable of interjecting by itself, because of the knowledge it’s garnered from sitting in on all your company’s meetings. None of the bags of atoms in the meeting can remember what the Q4 advertising budget was? Otter’s AI should be able to pipe up with the answer.
The irony is that, without my AI assistant, they probably got less attention than they would otherwise
Of course, the backlash has started. Hand-wringing pieces lamenting the fact that people are turning up for online meetings to find they’re the only human in the room. I attended a meeting recently where the host demanded all AI assistants be switched off, so that “I have your full attention”. This person clearly missed their calling as a primary school teacher.
The irony is that, without my AI assistant, they probably got less attention than they would otherwise. Otter.aiallows me to be more present in meetings, not less. My shorthand was never very good; now it’s about as readable as the leaflet they put in packets of paracetamol. When I’m scribbling notes in briefings or meetings, I’m not really paying attention to what’s being said, I’m trying to remember what was said ten seconds ago and get it down before I forget. Because, as I edge recklessly closer to what the Sunday supplements insist on calling “middle-aged”, my memory is about as reliable as West Ham’s back four.
With Otter.ai in a meeting, I need not fret about jotting down important information. I can see it’s taking down everything said in the meeting, as the transcription streams across my screen like the Grandstand vidiprinter while someone is talking. It records the audio, in case the transcription falters or I need to go back and check something later. And at the end of the meeting I’ll not only have a superbly formatted summary of the discussion, but be able to ask the AI questions about what was said. It means I can engage fully in the meeting, not be constantly scribbling away, only half-conscious of what’s just been said.
When people moan about newfangled AI assistants in meetings they’re really moaning about centuries-old human failings
The advent of AI meeting assistants has made me a more active participant, and it’s improved the quality of my interviews, because I can think about what question to ask next based on the previous answer, not just blather something out because I’m still jotting down the previous response. It’s one reason we now run in-depth and (I hope) interesting Q&As in the news section.
Now, of course there’s a flip side to this. If people are using AI assistants as a pure proxy in meetings, those meetings are going to be as much use as Matt Hancock. I can only ever recall doing this once, when I had to rush out of an online meeting to pick up my daughter from school and left the AI assistant running, so I could later catch up on what I missed.
But I wouldn’t have the audacity to use an AI stand-in in 99% of meetings I attend, because the whole point of me being in those meetings is that I’m making a contribution. I wouldn’t have many clients left if I tried to palm them off on my AI helper, no matter how well it knew my business, because they’re paying for me, not a hollow facsimile of me that isn’t empowered to make decisions.
So when people moan about new-fangled AI assistants in meetings they’re really moaning about centuries-old human failings. Laziness, chiefly. If it makes no difference whether you or your AI assistant attend a meeting, you either shouldn’t be in that meeting in the first place, or you’re about to be replaced by someone who should
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