The Copilot Doesn't Need to Speak in the MeetingThe Copilot Doesn't Need to Speak in the Meeting

There's a montage in Martha Coolidge's 1985 movie Real Genius where, as the semester unfolds, a lecture hall filled with students listening to a professor's lesson turns into a lecture hall filled with tape recorders recording the professor's lesson -- and ending, finally, in the professor's tape recorder playing his lecture to an audience of student tape recorders with a useless chalkboard message: "Math on tape is hard to follow, so please listen carefully."

Any time I read about how generative AI avatars will eventually attend meetings in your stead and then tell you what happened, I think about that room full of tape recorders. Would this technology actually be a time-saving measure -- or would missing that meeting just create more work for humans as they tried to fill in missing context?

Here's my unpopular opinion: Attending meetings and taking notes can be insanely productive. After I take notes in a meeting, I'm much more capable of tying the individual insights and to-dos into a bigger picture. There's science to explain why this is the case: In a 2011 paper for the American Journal of Psychology, Mark Bohay, Daniel P. Blakely, Andrea K. Tamplin and Gabriel A. Radvansky, authors of "Note Taking, Review, Memory, and Comprehension," wrote, "Note taking increases the degree to which a person attends to the text, noting which ideas need to be jotted down and which are better left unnoted." 

It's not merely the act of recording the ideas; it's the active assessment and human judgment of which ideas are worth paying attention to that helps them stick in one's brain. And this is where I wonder: when copilots fill in with meeting recaps, attendees are no longer tasked with actively engaging with ideas. They're waiting for the tool to tell them what to pay attention to; it's a more passive form of information reception. How will the change in engagement affect employee performance and the quality of their work?

This isn't to say generative AI copilots couldn't make life easier at work.  A meeting recap that focuses on managing the details of task management would be so useful: action items assigned, participant contact info linked, and attendees seeing those follow-up items automatically dropped onto their to-do lists (complete with hyperlinked references to background materials, shared files or people with whom to collaborate) and given deadlines that have been cross-checked against their calendars and typical working patterns to find the optimal times -- ooh, that's the dream. 

Offloading the work of managing your work would be an excellent use case for any generative AI copilot. 

Good workspace leaders know that optimizing employee experience isn't just centered on engagement -- it's also making sure their people have the tools they need to do their jobs. When it's time to bring generative AI into the workplace, ask how the copilots and assistants will strip away the work of managing work and give people more bandwidth to genuinely engage in the active acts of assessing and acting on information. You want active engagement -- not a room full of tape recorders sending or receiving messages with the real insight lost in transmission.