A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
Logitech B2B
Is AI a Cure for Bad Meetings?
Company leaders, productivity experts, behavioral scientists, and Big Tech continue to weigh in on the right formula to make meetings more fruitful and enjoyable. In recent years, AI has entered the conversation, bringing its cure for the problems that plague the meeting experience.
The world’s recent fascination with ChatGPT has opened the floodgates of discussion about how AI generative technologies affect the world in which we live–and work. While there are plenty of wrinkles to be ironed out, ChatGPT has the potential to make our workplaces significantly easier. If we focus on meetings, there’s a treasure trove of uses that can reduce some of the drudgeries we normally associate with meetings.
Lucid Meetings estimates that there are 62 -80 million meetings in the US every day (I’m sure many of you, like me, feel like you participate in a million of them!). What if, after each meeting, Chat GPT analyzed video recordings, distilled the most important takeaways, and sent those to attendees with assigned follow-up items? Imagine how much time that would save collectively.
But let’s go further than ChatGPT and further than the benefit of time savings. Less attention has been paid to other AI innovations making a big, positive difference in the meeting experience, particularly in hybrid work models.
Enter AI to help level the playing field for remote workers.
Unlike the loud splash, ChatGPT made when it became available to the public, much of the AI wizardry sits quietly behind the curtain in today’s leading video meeting technology. For instance, the AI in Logitech conference room systems is machine learning-trained on over 20,000 voices to differentiate undesirable noise from human speech. AI sound optimization automatically levels louder and softer voices in the meeting and removes unwanted noises like keyboards clacking.
In recent years, AI has entered the conversation, bringing its cure for the problems that plague the meeting experience
Conference room systems use multiple cameras and facial and human body recognition to detect and frame people to capture the best perspective of the action in the room and display that view to the employees' video calling from home. These technologies are getting increasingly intelligent about tracking conversations and sparing the remote workers the uncomfortable bowling-alley view of a long conference room table with colleagues who appear tiny on the screen. The result is deeper understanding and engagement for hybrid workers who can now feel as if they are seated at the same table rather than an outsider peering in.
But it’s not all about net-new tech. One of the beauties of AI in the conference room is that it can adapt older, longstanding tools to fit new ways of working. Consider the whiteboard, a brainstorming staple that was in danger of becoming obsolete when the world went remote. AI allows sharing of whiteboard content into video calls and even creates a transparency effect to allow remote participants to see through the presenter for an unobstructed view of the whiteboard.
There’s still a long way to go to change the perception of meetings from miserable to meaningful, but the tech industry is making huge strides to that end. In the near future, we’ll also see the benefits of AI not only in the meeting room experience but the “under the hood” benefits that AI will bring for IT leaders with analytics and automation.
