valuing the company at $1.5 billion<\/a>. Fireflies is also worth over $1 billion.<\/p>\nI use AI transcription software when I am interviewing people and find it invaluable, saving me enormous amounts of time even when the transcription is ropey, as it often is.<\/p>\n
There are, however, some serious problems with inviting AI note-takers into our meetings, beyond the niggling concern that people will avoid voicing difficult opinions, if they know every throwaway remark is being recorded.<\/p>\n
The key one is privacy. The rules about recording meetings are not black and white in the UK. It is perfectly legal, in many cases, to record people without permission. It\u2019s what you do with that recording afterwards, and whether you share it, that gets you into hot water.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most companies believe that a simple \u201cthis meeting is being recorded\u201d is enough to cover themselves. But when does the recording start and when does it end?<\/p>\n
On X there\u2019s a user called Nikita who recently pointed out that if you join Google Meet three minutes before the start of the scheduled meeting, everyone else\u2019s virtual note-takers join early too. You can then spend a few seconds screaming, claiming you\u2019re on the Titanic, that you\u2019ve just hit an iceberg and require immediate assistance. Once everyone else arrives, you behave as normal. At the end, everyone is emailed an AI summary with the top bullet point: \u201cNikita has hit an iceberg and is sinking fast. Suggested next steps: send a lifeboat.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is clearly mischievous fun, but I met someone recently who was shocked to be sent an email containing an AI summary of a meeting with an external client she had attended. Not only had she (perhaps naively) failed to realise the meeting was being recorded, but it had captured the conversation that took place after she had left the call, where they discussed how overrated she was. She was appalled, but didn\u2019t want to jeopardise her contract by complaining.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No UK employment tribunal, to my knowledge, has featured someone claiming workplace harassment because the AI note-taker consistently made them sound like an idiot in meetings, but it\u2019s only a matter of time.<\/p>\n
There is a possibly more important issue with this technology. Namely, it doesn\u2019t lighten the crushing burden that meetings impose on us. I have been looking into this topic for The Sunday Times Magazine for a piece that is being published this weekend. The average UK worker attends 12.6 meetings every week, up from eight back in 2019 before Covid. That\u2019s according to Fellow, a Canadian software company that, yes, records, transcribes and summarises meetings, and analyses thousands of its users\u2019 calendars. Though meetings have got shorter, the average office worker is still spending nearly a quarter of their working week in a meeting, up from a fifth of their time before Covid.<\/p>\n
Has UK productivity increased during this time? Of course it hasn\u2019t. What has increased is the ease with which we can now host and attend meetings, thanks to video conferencing. A decade ago, few executives would say to a client, \u201clet\u2019s jump on the train at 3pm this afternoon to meet for 15 minutes.\u201d Now, \u201chopping on a call\u201d at a few hours\u2019 notice is standard practice.<\/p>\n
AI note-taking is not to blame. Some of the technologies I came across are attempting to make meetings better. Meeting Canary, designed in the UK, alerts the boss \u2014 or whoever is in charge \u2014 if they are failing to include the opinions of certain attendees and whether the agenda is being followed. AI note-takers are becoming more than just silent secretaries in the corner, some are now firm-handed moderators, ensuring things run smoothly.<\/p>\n
But it is in no one\u2019s interest \u2014 certainly not that of the multibillion AI note taking industry \u2014 to design software to say: \u201cAre you sure this meeting is really necessary?\u201d<\/p>\n
Because in many cases it isn\u2019t. As so often, AI isn\u2019t really helping us work better, it\u2019s just helping us work more.<\/p>\n
Harry Wallop is a consumer journalist and broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter @hwallop<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s a quiz question. You are told to attend a six-person meeting; four will be in the office,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-524888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}