AI can make meetings more efficient, but when every comment becomes data for evaluating employees, it can distort communication, amplify bias, and change behavior.
AI is the default companion to meetings. Unlike the humans for which they proxy, AI agents show up on time, can be in two places at once, and have near perfect recall. That, however, can be the problem. Meetings could potentially shift from being tools used to achieve business metrics to becoming a business metric themselves. This would alter behavior and jeopardize the value of meetings, and even communication generally.
Let’s first consider the upside of AI in meetings. It’s a great note taker. It will transcribe the whole meeting, as well as provide summaries and action points. That can even be personalized, i.e., your summary and actions from the meeting are tailored for you while the one I receive is tailored to what’s relevant for me.
AI can read the agenda and pull together relevant data for you ahead of time. Additionally, it can be a real-time companion. Even if new topics come up, you can use AI in real time to find the relevant information or do some first-pass analysis for you. It won’t be long before AI can proactively do this without you asking.
In “Meetings 2.0: How AI Will Transform Meetings” I discuss other benefits of AI in meetings. Benefits include keeping meetings focused and on track, potentially making them more efficient, and even running parallel tracks for us. It’s a brave new world.
Of course, it’s also 1984 and Big Brother, or rather Big Tech, is always listening. We tell people to be careful what they write on the internet because once posted it can never be taken down. That’s now going to be true for everything at work.
This may cut down on sexist remarks and inappropriate jokes, which is a good thing. But it can go too far. It’s easy to imagine a future where you’re up for a promotion or a raise and there’s a component of your review based on meetings. HR could have AI go through every comment you made in a meeting to decide if you “sound” like you’re ready for the promotion. It could even go beyond your ideas and potentially also your word choice and grammar. They might even use tone.
Suddenly you’re under the microscope. Perhaps you like to think out loud and you throw out a lot of ideas at meetings. You could be seen as someone who generates more ideas than your peers. Wonderful. But AI could also see that you have more wrong ideas than your peers; that’s not so good. Perhaps when you throw out ideas, there’s hesitancy in your voice. After all, you’re brainstorming and just getting ideas out. AI, oriented to leaders who speak definitively, thinks you don’t sound like a leader.
Certain activities work best when people are free to try and fail. Brainstorming is the most obvious example. But thinking through ideas, participating in strategy meetings, or simply trying to look at something from different perspectives all benefit from free-flowing thinking. When imperfect, let alone wrong, ideas have negative consequences, people self-censor and creativity and more holistic thinking slow to a trickle.
Actually, I think that maybe there could be an issue here with bias, too. I’m just saying that I feel some language can undermine you. I may be wrong, but I guess it kind of feels like people do get judged sometimes. Sorry.
Research by Dr. Deborah Tannen at Georgetown and others has found that certain words and phrases undermine the strength of the message. Oftentimes, these words are used by women. See Tannen’s Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work for more on language and gender in the workplace. The phrases in the preceding paragraph are from the Just Not Sorry free Chrome extension created by Tami Reiss to help catch these in your emails. (Disclaimer: Tami Reiss and Deborah Tannen are both friends of mine.)
Women are judged today by their peers for their style of speaking. Done right, AI could remove the bias. Done wrong, it could further amplify the bias. Do you trust that AI today, or even in the next few years, will do the former and not the latter? I don’t.
Context also matters. It’s not yet clear how well AI picks up on sarcasm. There are also context-specific terms and phrases, including everything from a WENUS report (ask your friends) to inside jokes and references to something said in the hallway ten minutes ago that AI doesn’t know about. Without this context, things can be misinterpreted. AI is notorious for missing context or relevant information, especially with long inputs. The difference between “I agree and here’s why . . .” and “I generally agree but want to play devil’s advocate for a second . . .” can lead AI to read what follows as agreement in the first case and criticism in the second, while missing the important qualifier.
Finally, we should consider Goodhart's law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If people know they’re being judged on how they communicate, they will inherently change their communication. Like a corporate cobra effect, some people may try to speak more at meetings for the sake of being seen to speak more, rather than for the actual purpose of the meetings: conveying ideas.
The above is written for meetings, but it really applies to any recorded communication that can be analyzed. Some companies record most conversations, even if they’re not part of a formal meeting. It can just as easily apply to emails, instant messages, reports, and other forms of communication. You probably review and spell check your major reports, but do you really grammarsmith your text messages?
Most tools can be used for good or misused to do harm, internally or otherwise. AI is no different. AI that can make our meetings more relevant and efficient is a huge win. AI that can be used to judge us can undermine the fidelity and usefulness of our communication. If the path to hell was originally paved with good intentions, it risks getting resurfaced with AI.
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