Can AI make meetings more interesting?
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We can all agree that meetings are the most unproductive time of the day. Reducing the amount of low-quality meetings people have to attend and allowing them to focus on important work can go a long way towards increasing job satisfaction and productivity.
Artificial intelligence may have a new approach to this disaster, but it needs to be interactive in an intelligent sense, not just a crutch for humans caught up in a tedious process.
Consider the job of a software developer. Brian Houck, chief productivity engineer at Microsoft, studied the productivity patterns of his 5,000 software engineers at the company and shared some of the results with his Developer Productivity in New York hosted by Gradle. Engineering (DPE) conference participants.
The research revealed that developers’ time frictions, especially having to wait for code reviews or spend time in meetings, are causing developers to lose focus. . “Focused work, on the other hand, comes from “an hour or more of uninterrupted time without email, IM, or jumping on a team call or Zoom call.”
The key, Hoch continued, is to “spend less time in low-quality meetings.” “Too many meetings is the second most cited workplace challenge for developers.”On the other hand, a high-quality meeting is one that involves collaboration and meeting with your boss.
“How can I tell if a meeting is a low-quality meeting?” he asked. “One way is if you’re doing something else during that meeting. If you find yourself sending emails or writing code, you’re not being more productive. , you’re in a meeting you shouldn’t be in.”
Enter AI. “Imagine a conversational AI eavesdropping on a discussion and using audio data conversion to automatically generate notes of what was said,” said Professor David Schrier of Imperial College. Imagine if the AI was connected to our calendar and email and had ideas that were contextual to our conversations.”
Furthermore, “AI not only transcribes our words, but also understands the meaning behind them, extracts the key themes of our discussions, and listens to the verbal cues of those assigned responsibility. Imagine being able to pick up and outline a project plan.”
Schur discusses these possibilities in his latest book, “Welcome to AI: A Human Guide to Artificial Intelligence,” in which he explores the possibilities to not only make everyone’s work easier, but also more insightful. We are driving the development of human-level AI that can be both powerful and rewarding.
For meetings, hybrid human-machine interaction has meant that “AI acts as a digital assistant in the background, helping us look each other in the eye and stay focused.” What AI Admins Want Us to Remember “Imagine what your organization would be like if you tracked them,” he suggested.
“When follow-up items don’t fall through the cracks, there’s a discreet and useful machine that reminds you of important priorities in your workflow, helps you manage your team, and promotes yourself so you can start projects ahead of schedule.” And it’s within budget,” he continued. “And imagine if these AI systems could help evaluate delivery probabilities and adjust for anticipated problems.”
Of course, the possibilities extend far beyond just meetings and into every aspect of work and life. The key is to focus on ambient AI that delivers human-scale benefits. “We need to go beyond just listening and understanding, beyond interpretation and prediction, and even beyond connectivity, to achieve deeper collaboration between AI and human systems,” Schur said.
Chatbots, while still clunky, can help pave the way for such collaboration. “It seems inevitable that chatbots will be integrated with calendars and other features to create virtual assistants,” he added. “While this may be a labor replacement for human administrators, it can help busy entrepreneurs and executives be more productive.”
The current thinking about virtual assistants is that they run in the background and provide guidance, but there are also risks to their use. “AI assistants can make your brain a little weaker, like an underutilized muscle,” Schur says. “This gave rise to the term ‘Google brain’ as people were no longer able to retain facts and figures with just a few key presses in the search bar.” Think of it in terms of following directions from a GPS without knowing it.
Instead, AI should act as a conversational, intelligent assistant. “What if we had an AI that could learn what we know and what we want to know?” Shrier asks. “Then, during working hours, AI began to make suggestions to extend our thinking, perhaps even in new and unexpected directions, but in all cases in line with our aspirations and goals. ?”
Hybrid human-AI tools need to “work well with what we’re already doing and help us do it better,” he argues. “Where human-AI hybrids excel is by taking the best of what humans can do and merging them into new creations, ‘digital centaurs’ that bring creativity and power into a seamless whole. This is where I am.”
This is the hallmark of a truly productive partnership without meetings.
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