5 Ways AI Can Improve Your Next Meeting

Five ways to improve your team meetings through the use of AI meeting assistants

Let's say there was a person who experienced every online meeting cliche. Well… that’s me.

• Multi-hour calls to discuss complicated subjects – all on dial-in, no visuals

• Getting distracted by poor Internet connection, cats, food deliveries, or funny memes, right in the middle of the meeting

• Having zero recollection of something your boss mentioned in a two-hour meeting, and having no way to retrieve the information when they ask for it

  
  

Even before the pandemic, I wondered if AI assistants could fundamentally change how we do meetings. When the world entered the era of remote work, it was a much needed switch. But I was skeptical. It can’t be that easy to replace a human, right?

The median estimate among leading computer scientists reported a 50% chance that high-level machine intelligence systems technology would arrive within 45 years. This is a fairly long-term forecast, but where are we now?

The fact is,the future is already here — it's just unevenly distributed. Boom, "under the hood" everywhere AI/ML – determining post range into our social networks, automatic selection of photos in our iPhone galleries or Google Photo app, improved graphics in games, separate ML chips for calculations in processors, intelligent ads trackers, etc.

These tools are not science fiction. It sounds a bit "Rick and Morty" like, but AI assistants are already here too and they’re working for many companies and individuals, helping them get the most out of their meetings.

The peak of voice assistant popularity happened even before the transition to hybrid/remote work. Remember when Siri hopelessly tried to answer a difficult question from a reporter at a briefing at the White House? Personal assistants have come a long way since then. The first step to using them is pretty simple.

1. Send your AI assistant in your place 🚀

A colleague of mine once took a trip and missed a week of marathon meetings. It took him another week to go through all the messages and emails he’d received. Then, we had to have more meetings to tell him what he missed, after which we could finally move ahead, three weeks behind schedule.

We needed a way to avoid these delays, while also giving our teammates time to relax, and that’s why we started using AI assistants. They record all the meetings we miss and create a summary of everything that happened.

Now, my colleague just needs one quick call to sync up with the team, and the workflow continues, uninterrupted. This is an entirely different experience for him — it saves time, energy, and a blistering headache from too many Zoom calls.

But sometimes, a mere transcription is not enough. AI assistants can also analyze my meetings for me, and actually reduce the time I spend attending them.

2. Have your AI assistant summarize the conversation 🚀

The very first time an AI assistant was on the call, I didn’t notice much difference until after the meeting, when I received a follow-up email with a link to our meeting details.

That was a personal 'wow-moment'. I could see a summary of everything we discussed, a transcription of the whole conversation, with all the important points highlighted. If a particular topic or outcome interested me, I could simply dive in and read what was said or re-listen to that part of the conversation.

As someone who has attended an uncountable number of meetings, it was like looking at a cheat sheet.

Your time is valuable and an AI assistant that can efficiently analyze your meetings can save it. I use Sembly Professional because of its smart topic summary "Glance View". Other platforms also offer meeting transcription, but the Sembly layout is suited to my preferences and takes me to the interesting bits more quickly.

I was impressed with my first few uses of an AI assistant and I used Sembly consistently with my team. That is how I discovered another one of its ultimate powers.

3. Get the AI assistant to call out important actions, issues, and risks 🚀

Regardless of the communication platform, the purpose of a team meeting is not just to share information, but also to make decisions. The Actions automatic detection (on Sembly) allows me to easily delegate tasks after my meetings.

The forms in which these entities can be stored differ markedly from platform to platform. For example, if you use Zoom, then thanks to Zoom Apps you can add an assistant or tool as an add-on, directly to your call. For Microsoft Teams, this could be MIPA as a bridge between Teams and Office 365.

As always, the tool that is most convenient is the one that does everything automatically for you. And that brings us to another perk of using AI assistants — note taking.

4. Have your AI assistant take notes, using simple voice commands 🚀

Sometimes, the topic of a meeting is so gnarly, that not even a summary or reading the transcript will do it justice. Supplementing it with screenshots is time consuming and annoying.

AI Assistants free you from being distracted personally during a call, by doing your note taking for you. And triggering it is easy — you simply have to speak.

Just say the desired command or instruction out loud to the assistant in your meeting and watch it obey you at lighting speed.

If your colleague demonstrated something during a video call, then you can share the right moment using products like tl;dv for Google Meet to share a video segment of the desired meeting.

But, what if, like me, you have to navigate uncountable meetings and your browser is overloaded with tabs?

5. Search across all the meetings that your AI assistant has attended 🚀

This one is my personal favorite. AI assistants allow you to text-search for past meetings from almost ANY platform, all in one place! You can simply search for any term used in the meeting you’re looking for, and recover the EXACT data you want to find, with just a few clicks.

I cannot recall the last time I asked my boss, “Do you remember the idea I had in that meeting one month ago?”

I cannot remember hurricane catch-ups on Slack and attending meetings when I’m too ill to follow. By using AI assistants to lighten my load, I feel more incharge of my work and my time.

In fact, we saw a reduction in meeting duration and increased engagement from attendees across my entire team. And everyone is happy to have some freedom and send their assistants in their stead.

Try inviting an AI assistant the next time you’re double booked, or just really,really don't want to attend a meeting. They might surprise you.