Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans.
He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
↫ Lisa Bonos and Danielle Abril at The Bezos Post
Management strongly encourages – mandates – that everyone use “AI” to improve productivity, but then gets all uppity when people actually do.
Welcome to “finding out”.
> “I want to talk to people,” said Sellers, who runs a content agency for entrepreneurs out of Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t want to talk to a bunch of note takers,” he said
At work we had a poster on the wall saying : “If you’re feeling unproductive, organize a meeting”. Many middle managers value meetings as productive time, completely ignoring that for half the people on the call it’s completely wasted time, with people I don’t even like talking to.
I hear you there — this phenomenon feels like an indictment of the usefulness of meetings more than anything 🙂
Some PowerPoint are… on point though.
Some of them know, but meetings are how they justify their own existence.
Meetings are primarily for making decisions. If you are not a stakeholder to the decision, you should not be there.
If “for half the people on the call it’s completely wasted time” then whoever sent the invite screwed up. If the right people are there and the meeting is well run, meetings are very productive time.
“If you’re feeling unproductive, organize a meeting” should be interpreted as “if you think things can be better, propose an improvement and drive the decision to implement it”. You do not need a meeting to improve your own productivity. You do not need a meeting to implement a change you have the authority to assert. But a meeting may be the only (or best) way to improve the team or the company.
“Meetings are primarily for making decisions” – That’s how meetings of engineers go. Meetings of managers are there to ensure that people are “involved”. You may skip most of them and productivity wouldn’t be affected… but you would get lower grades and less salary. So that’s mostly a net loss for everyone except managers who can use them to justify raises for them.
“For half the people on the call it’s completely wasted time” is great meeting for manager: these people don’t hurt the meeting and they show “involvement” which helps with getting the raise… and the fact that company suffers is irrelevant, who is supposed to care about THAT, anyway?
Well, I see an opportunity here. Apparently people want brief written forms of communication instead of talking hours and hours. Maybe we should invent a protocol where people can discuss things in writing. It could be in plain text (but then Microsoft would add rich text elements to it anyway). What do you think? We could give it a catchy name like e-talk or something.
To be fair: Whenever I have a question or a challenge, I want an instant meeting and discuss until a solution is found. Whenever someone else needs something from me, I suddenly prefer e-mails.
Or collaborative “boards” like Confluence or a shared TiddlyWiki ?
Ha, that’s the perfect way to put it. I’ve been guilty of that sort of thing myself.
Many managers exist to push people to work; they usually posses some manipulative skills, but they need meetings to exercise it.
Who’d have thunk it, people don’t like meeting, after meeting, after meeting, after meeting.
Micromanagers beware, you thought this AI tool was going to increase your surveillance capability, but now the CEO has realised you’re redundant!
I am so tired of AI being crammed into everything and being mandated for me to use. I have found several uses that save me time or help me out but not everything must include it. I am seeing that we now have a huge problem coming of no one actually “knows” how to figure stuff out. If the AI doesn’t know they are just stumped.
The issue for me here is I can almost guarantee the people with the bots didn’t later Read the notes. So no, they didn’t attend.
It would be much better if the individuals who delegated to AI were honest and declined the meeting.
All AI has done here is waste computing resource
I agree with this. I paid for an AI note taker on my phone to help me make sure I didn’t miss anything in meetings I was actually attending. After 6 months of recording and transcribing meetings I realized I had only gone back and read the notes twice. I stopped my subscription and stopped using it.
“Management strongly encourages – mandates”
Employees: Use AI to replace entire management
Management: But not like this
HR: We’re proudly using AI
Candidate: Uses AI to solve scammy recruitment questions (which are disconnected from reality) ( ͡€ ͜ʖ ͡€)
HR: But that’s cheating
By that reasoning these companies must not be allowed to use AI when delivering solutions to customers, because it’s cheating
My “How to deal with tedious/pointless/unnecessary meetings” pro-tip, from someone who has spent FAR too much time in 60-90 minute meetings where there was (at best) 5 minutes actually relevant to me:
1. Before* the meeting, record 30-60 seconds or so of yourself on the same system you’ll be using to join the meeting from — E.g. on recent versions of Windows, you can use the “Camera” app, as it has a blur-background filter that looks similar to Zoom’s (if you use that). Save the recording as a file.
*Or during, if it’s a particularly tedious meeting where no one will notice/care if you turn off your camera for a minute or two
2. Go into the Zoom video settings, and assign that video you just recorded as your virtual background.
3. Join the meeting/turn video back and walk away. It works best if you have a webcam with a physical privacy shutter, so you can have the camera on but blocked; otherwise, your recording of yourself might be partially visible behind you while you’re still on-camera — though it IS Zoom, people will probably just chalk it up to it being glitchy again.
And if you actually DO have to participate in the meeting, just turn your video off, disable the virtual bacgkround, and turn it back on (and open the privacy shutter on the camera if using that). “Whoops, accidentally turned video off when trying to un-mute myself, darn Zoom!”
For extra malicious-compliance points, if you’re doing contract/freelance work where the meeting time is billable (which happens, despite that being even dumber than wasting the time of salaried staff), then do other billable work during the meeting — ideally for the same client. Being paid twice for the same time is one way of making the tedium of pointless meetings more bearable.