SPOTLIGHT: Are AI assistants the best thing to happen to work meetings? It depends who you ask.
April 2025
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If your calendar is jam packed full of meetings, you're not alone. Business leaders and employees are increasingly turning to AI bots to transcribe meetings and even provide summaries of what was discussed.
AI is playing an increasingly significant role in meetings. There are AI tools to transcribe meetings, AI tools to summarize meetings, AI tools to "call up data and charts from past meetings or other relevant documents to help keep discussions on track," tools to ensure equal time for all meeting participants, and so on.
Experts say the widespread introduction of AI meeting assistants “raises troubling questions around etiquette and privacy and risks undercutting the very communication it’s meant to improve.”
In the tech sector, some leaders say "there are AI notetakers at 80% of the meetings" they attend, and some meetings include "two or more bots brought in by different attendees … transcribing and summarizing at the same time."
Experts say that while AI meeting assistants provide a useful service, there is the "potential for AI to “hallucinate” quotes based on its training data or to extrapolate what was said into something that wasn’t."
Others wonder how the presence of AI notetakers might change what is said in the first place by meeting participants. Could the AI notetakers production of notes be "taken out of context"? Could the speaker's thoughts and words "be used as training data by a tech company"?
Read more via Bloomberg
Otter.ai offers meeting transcription.
Fireflies.ai is a meeting assistant with notetaking capability.
Fellow's meeting assistant gets high marks for data security and privacy.
Equal Time offers features to run "inclusive, equitable, and efficient meetings."
tl;dv can generate meeting notes in 30 languages
Zoom offers an AI Companion. Through Copilot Pro, Microsoft Teams users can access AI transcription and meeting notes. Google Meet users can access AI transcription with a Gemini enterprise plan.
Sam Liang, CEO of transcription software company Otter.ai, has "developed a digital avatar that can fill in for him" at meetings. Liang says he would "like to spend less time attending them — at least the non-critical ones — and he’s betting that other CEOs feel the same way." The Sam-bot AI-powered avatar is being training on "what Liang has said in thousands of meetings and written in documents since he co-founded the company nearly a decade ago." The bot is designed to "handle about 90% of the minutiae and straightforward issues that arise in most business meetings," and, in doing so, will mean Liang will be able to spend less time in meetings and "spend more of his time developing new products, wooing potential clients and mentoring colleagues." Otter.ai plans to "demo the “Sam-bot” to existing clients by the end of the year so that their bosses, too, can send avatars to meetings in their stead."
We’re making a lot of progress, but it’s just not polished yet where we could release it to the public. When we test it internally, it works pretty well. But the emotional part is a little bit hard to evaluate."
Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan also sees the value in an AI avatar that could attend meetings in his stead. Yuan told one news outlet that a "digital twin" could represent him and "be part of the decision making process." If Yuan has his way, his AI avatar will also read "most of the emails" he receives.
Examples of AI meeting policies:
Johns Hopkins University asks its employees to "disable all current accounts associated with meeting assistants like Read.ai and Otter.ai" and tells hosts of Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings to "remove any AI bots that join as meeting participants." The university's website explains that, in order to protect the "privacy and security" of its community, only specific AI meeting assistant tools are allowed to be used. (Johns Hopkins)
In February 2025, Harvard University issued new guidance with respect to AI meeting assistants or bots. Due to "substantial privacy, regulatory, and legal risks," community members were advised to use only specific, approved AI meeting assistants in Harvard meetings. (Harvard Crimson)
The Society of Petroleum Engineers' guidelines for AI assistants in meetings allows for the use of any AI tool, provided it is "approved by all members of the committee meeting before its use." Users who plan to use such a tool are required to disclose their planned usage "as soon as they join the meeting, noting its intended use, and ask permission before activating it." AI tools that don't get full committee approval are required to be removed. (SPE)
In April 2025, the EU commission banned AI agents from attending online meetings. The new rule "bars virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence from participating in its meetings." (Politico)
