You’ve probably seen the memes lamenting that “this meeting could have been an email”.
And if you feel as though you spend a large chunk of your working week in unnecessary meetings, you’re right – a recent study by Harvard Business School has found that workers now attend 13 per cent more meetings since the pandemic.
But would you be prepared to have a chatbot, programmed to think and behave just like you, attend a meeting in your place so you didn’t have to?
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While this idea of cloning yourself might sound far-fetched, this is something Zoom founder, Eric Yuan is working on.
Speaking on a podcast, Yuan shared that his vision for Zoom goes far beyond video conferencing and his hope that generative AI avatars, working off their own LLMs, will be able to participate in meetings on your behalf in the not too distant future.
“Let’s assume, fast-forward five or six years, that AI is ready. AI probably can help for maybe 90 per cent of the work,” he said. “You do not need to spend so much time [in meetings]. You do not have to have five or six Zoom calls every day. You can leverage the AI to do that.”
Even more interestingly, Yuan alluded to your digital clone potentially being programmed to be better equipped to deal with areas you don’t feel confident in, for example, negotiating a deal during a sales call.
“Sometimes I know I’m not good at negotiations. Sometimes I don’t join a sales call with customers,” he explained. “I know my weakness before sending a digital version of myself. I know that weakness. I can modify the parameter a little bit.”
AI tools for productivity
While Yuan didn’t go into specifics about how or when Zoom is planning on releasing a type of AI clone to help improve productivity to this extent, the reality is that AI tools are already infiltrating the workplace on a mass scale.
According to Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index, 75 per cent of knowledge workers use AI at work every day. This is despite 46 per cent of those users not using it less than six months ago.
Those who do use it cite saving time (90 per cent), being able to focus on important work (85 per cent), being more creative (84 per cent) and enjoying their work more (83 per cent) as the main benefits.
However, leaders are lagging behind when it comes to incorporating AI productivity tools – 59 per cent worry about quantifying the productivity gains of AI and as a result, 78 per cent of AI users are bringing their own AI tools to work and 52 per cent who use AI at work are reluctant to admit to it for fear it makes them look replaceable.
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If meetings are the first place you’d like to utilise AI, why not try Otter.ai? It can record and transcribe meetings in real time so you don’t have to take detailed notes during meetings and can instantly review the content discussed, provide summaries and assign action points afterwards. It can also auto-join Zoom, Meet and Teams calls.
Or perhaps you want to streamline the process of putting a presentation together. While ChatGPT and Claude.ai can generate presentation outlines and help develop the information you need to relay, they won’t put the deck together for you. Beautiful.ai on the other hand can generate slides based on text prompts and can create graphs or charts accordingly.
Finally, if you find yourself getting bogged down in the ‘what ifs’ when putting together a report or pitching a new idea to a client, or even your own manager, why not ask generative AI to help you iron out any potential kinks?
By asking ChatGPT or Claude to take on a persona, you can upload the content in question and ask it to critique it and outline where it could be improved.
Additionally, you can then ask the chatbot of your choice to debate the idea with you by asking you a series of questions so you can prepare your pitch ahead of time.
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