Rebecca Hinds: evaluation

Transcript context

…I should also mention your book, the best meeting of your life, right? That's what it's called. Your best meeting ever. Your best meeting ever. You just reminded me of it in that comment about how bots are being brought into meetings. What's new in meetings? How would you update your advice as we see evolving cultural expectations practices around meetings? Oh gosh, this is an hour question. I think meetings are not unlike any other work practice in many ways. They're the most dysfunctional work practice. But what we're seeing with every work practice is AI is helping in some places and AI is making things more dysfunctional. I'm incredibly excited about the potential of AI injected in meetings to help us have a better sense of the health of a meeting. And I'm seeing so many examples working with organizations all across the world of people using AI in fundamentally different ways to Understand whether the dynamics in the meeting are healthy. Understand whether executives are dominating the airtime. Automatically auto delete meetings from calendars when they fail to have a good meeting design and agenda or people accept. Even measuring collaboration, understanding are people in the right collaborative mode for creativity versus coordination? That is all. I could nerd out on that forever. Where I'm seeing a lot of dysfunction is cognitively offloading to AI and sending our digital twins to meetings instead of showing up ourselves. And we have, I don't know if these stats made it into the end report. They certainly, we have a UK piece where we see this on another level and certainly there's some stats on the sheer. amount of people who have sent digital twins to lead meetings on their behalf and the sheer volume of meetings that now have at least one note taker, that's where I become very nervous and frustrated because meetings are so expensive. They're one of these activities that the power and potential of them is that they are deeply human. If we think that we can send a note taker bot to a meeting instead of showing up ourselves, well that is a symptom of we didn't need the meeting. And that is something that maybe AI can fix. Maybe if it has enough information it can fix. But some of these things, ground zero fundamentals, having an understanding of what deserves to be a meeting in your organization is the first step. It's largely independent of AI in terms of fundamentally rethinking having the right purpose for a meeting and ensuring that it truly does warrant that live synchronous time that is incredibly expensive. And the last point I'll say around this is we often, it's being referred to in the research right now as mental proof around the technology, the fact that We are watching how people use AI very carefully. And we're starting to be able to tell when people are bot ******** not always, but when people are bot ******** versus not. And when you see someone appear, certainly a manager, but anyone bot **** that triggers a sense of they don't value your time, right? The opposite is also true. If we see someone has invested enough time into designing a meeting, understanding how to use AI in a disciplined way, it's a reflection of the person. And I think that's what we're seeing in meetings as well. someone has invested enough time into designing a meeting, understanding how to use AI in a disciplined way, it's a reflection of the person. And I think that's what we're seeing in meetings as well. You send your digital note taker bot to a meeting, it signals that you don't value other people's time in a way that is a deeply human phenomenon. And I think that's another big piece of this whole picture inside and outside of meetings as well.…

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