Artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionize how we conduct and attend work meetings, with AI-powered notetaking apps and virtual assistants promising to dramatically reduce time spent in unnecessary gatherings. Matt Martin, CEO of calendar management company Clockwise, has experienced this firsthand by using Granola, an AI tool that takes notes and summarizes meetings, resulting in significant time savings and high-quality documentation.
The technology goes far beyond simple transcription. Sam Liang, CEO of Otter, regularly sends an AI stand-in to some of his 40 weekly meetings. His personalized AI avatar, trained on seven years of meetings, emails, and strategic documents, can answer approximately 90% of questions directed at him. Liang predicts that 20% of C-level executives will use AI avatars to attend routine meetings by the end of 2025.
These AI meeting assistants are evolving into comprehensive workplace tools capable of multiple functions: answering questions on behalf of executives, interviewing job candidates, training new employees, and identifying gaps in organizational knowledge. Richard White, founder of Fathom, envisions AI creating “highlight reels” of key meeting moments, allowing people to consume just five minutes of relevant content from hours of meetings across their organization.
The recruitment sector is already seeing tangible results. Alan Price, global head of talent acquisition at Deel, reports that AI bots conducting initial candidate interviews have enabled a single recruiter to hire 30-35 candidates within two weeks—a dramatic efficiency gain. When Deel posts customer service positions attracting 4,000 applications, AI handles preliminary interviews, allowing recruiters to review five or six interview summaries in the time it would take to conduct one traditional interview.
Experts like Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at UC San Diego, compare the impact to the introduction of the internet, suggesting the transformation will unfold over decades. The technology extends beyond audio capture to visual AI assistants like Softeye’s smart glasses, which could continuously recognize objects and people, providing contextual information and creating searchable records of daily interactions.
The ultimate goal is reducing “meeting inflation” by enabling fewer attendees while maintaining information flow through accessible AI-generated summaries and federated systems where personal AI agents retrieve relevant content from a centralized repository.
Key Quotes
When people ask me those questions, my avatar can answer probably 90% of those
Sam Liang, CEO of Otter, describing his personalized AI avatar trained on seven years of meetings and documents. This demonstrates how advanced AI assistants have become at representing executives’ knowledge and decision-making patterns.
You’ll have an AI that actually goes out and listens to every meeting in your org and comes back and tells you, ‘Here’s the five minutes of content you should pay attention to today’
Richard White, founder of Fathom, outlining his vision for AI-powered meeting highlight reels. This illustrates how AI could fundamentally change information flow in organizations by curating relevant content from countless meetings.
Nobody predicted the impact it was going to have on our lives. Same thing here. It’s going to take decades
Terry Sejnowski, neuroscientist at UC San Diego, comparing AI meeting assistants to the internet’s transformative impact. This perspective from a scientific advisor suggests the technology’s implications extend far beyond simple productivity gains.
The recruiter makes the decision, but it’s streamlined
Alan Price of Deel, explaining how AI interview bots have enabled recruiters to evaluate candidates 5-6 times faster while maintaining human oversight. This demonstrates AI’s current sweet spot: augmenting rather than replacing human judgment in high-stakes decisions.
Our Take
The convergence of AI meeting assistants with enterprise workflows marks a critical inflection point where AI moves from experimental to essential. What’s particularly striking is the speed of adoption among executives themselves—typically conservative about new technologies—with 20% projected to use AI avatars within a year.
The technology reveals an important pattern in successful AI deployment: solving acute pain points with measurable ROI. Meeting overload is universally acknowledged, making this a rare AI application with minimal resistance to adoption. However, the shift from AI as notetaker to AI as representative raises profound questions about presence, authenticity, and organizational culture.
The federated system approach White describes is crucial—avoiding a dystopian future of meetings populated entirely by bots. Yet this creates new challenges around data governance, access controls, and the permanence of recorded interactions. Organizations will need robust frameworks for what gets recorded, who can access it, and how long it’s retained. The capability to search for “pricing discussions that didn’t go well” is powerful for learning but potentially problematic for employee privacy and psychological safety.
Why This Matters
This development represents a fundamental shift in workplace productivity and organizational communication. As hybrid and remote work have led to calendar bloat, AI meeting assistants offer a practical solution to one of modern work’s most persistent problems: excessive time spent in meetings that could be emails or summaries.
The implications extend beyond individual time savings. AI-powered meeting documentation creates institutional knowledge repositories that can train new employees, identify communication patterns, and surface organizational insights previously lost in ephemeral conversations. The ability to analyze sentiment and tone opens possibilities for improving team dynamics and management effectiveness.
For the AI industry, this represents a high-value, immediately applicable use case that demonstrates clear ROI—a crucial factor for enterprise AI adoption. The prediction that 20% of C-suite executives will use AI avatars by end of 2025 signals rapid mainstream acceptance.
However, this technology also raises important questions about workplace surveillance, data privacy, and the nature of human presence in professional settings. As AI becomes capable of representing us in meetings and making decisions on our behalf, organizations will need to establish new norms around authenticity, accountability, and the boundaries of AI delegation.
Recommended Reading
For those interested in learning more about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and effective AI communication, here are some excellent resources:
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Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-notetaker-work-meetings-tech-save-time-boost-efficiency-2024-12