Services
Consulting
TCS Consulting Services to Achieve Success in the Digital Era
Highlights
- Meetings have long been vilified as as a waste of time.
- One problem with meetings is attendees must listen to a lot of information they either already know or never need to know.
- Generative AI can help by personalizing information streams, eliminating the need for many pointless meetings in the process.
On this page
A waste of time?
Meetings remain an inextricable part of corporate culture though they are often criticized as a waste of time.
Statements like “a meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours are wasted” add to the narrative about their ineffectiveness. Apple CEO Tim Cook has famously said: “The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.”
Despite these criticisms, meetings remain a ubiquitous part of many workplaces because they have been, until now, the best way to accomplish three important objectives:
- They can solidify social bonds, increasing camaraderie.
- They can empower groups to reach shared decisions together.
- They can be a platform for collecting and redistributing information.
All three of the above are necessary goals, and in the coming years, generative AI (GenAI) will be used to advance the pursuit of each. GenAI will help teams to better socialize together and salespeople to better ingratiate themselves to their customers. Likewise, GenAI will help streamline decision-making processes, ensuring better choices get made faster. Most impactfully, however, GenAI will transform how information is disseminated, eliminating the need for many pointless meetings in the process.
To further illustrate the dramatic transformation which AI will bring to meetings where the primary focus is exchanging information, let’s try to understand:
- The problem with meetings where information is exchanged.
- How AI can help by eliminating the need for such meetings entirely.
The problem with meetings where information is exchanged
Another famous saying on meetings goes: Meetings move at the speed of the slowest mind in the room.
While this can, unfortunately, be true, the primary problem with information-exchange meetings is they tend to include a lot of information already known to many attendees, as well as significant amounts of information which most attendees don’t need to know.
As an example, consider a daily standup, featuring 10 people, two each from five separate workstreams. During the recurring meeting, it is the job of each pair of participants to update the other four workstreams on their recent progress toward a shared goal. Keeping everyone informed about shared progress is essential to efficient collaboration, meaning that the daily standup serves an important function. Members of the different workstreams do need to know how the rest of their collaborators are doing, and whether any of their own specific efforts must be sped up, or slowed down, in response.
The problem with holding a 10-person daily meeting, however, is that ignorance is not shared equally. Of the 10 people attending the meeting, no two possess the same knowledge at the start. Persons 1 and 2, for instance, may already be up to speed on the recent progress of persons 3 and 4, but unaware of the progress made by persons 5 to 10. Person 6 may know what person 7 has accomplished, but not what person 8 has accomplished. Person 9 may already know the full updates from every team member, while person 10 knows none of them.
Compounding this problem is the fact that not everyone needs the same information at the conclusion of the meeting to proceed with their work efficiently. Person 1 may only need to know about the updates from persons 3 and 4, while person 2 may only need to know about the updates from persons 5 and 6. Person 7 might not require updates from anyone, while person 9 might require updates from everyone.
Rephrased, the problem with meetings where information is exchanged is that, at the start of a meeting, all attendees enter with unique information, and at the end of the meeting, they must all leave with unique information; yet during the meeting, they must sit through a discussion of all the information unknown to at least one person, as well as all the information required by at least one person. Consequently, every attendee spends a majority of his or her time sitting through updates which are either already known to them, or which they never need to know in the first place.
This constitutes a waste of time for everyone involved and is part of the reason why meetings have been so vilified. Meetings have persisted, however, because until very recently, they were the least bad way to collect and redistribute information to and from a group. Prior to the arrival of AI or more specifically, generative AI (GenAI), there simply was not a faster, easier technique to get information from people in the know to those who need that information.
How GenAI will help
The full capabilities of GenAI chatbots remain unknown.
No one is exactly sure what they can do, what they will be able to do, or what they will be used for. What is not up for debate, though, is the fact that AI chatbots excel when asked to collect information and then redistribute that information through a variety of mediums. For instance, if one were to input a string of text, or a collection of audio files, or a 100-page pdf, or all three, into an AI chatbot, then that chatbot would be able to repackage and retransmit all the information it receives into many different formats, almost instantaneously.
In fact, people have used AI chatbots to repackage uploaded information into summary outlines, PowerPoint presentations, interactive dashboards, and even a hyper-realistic podcasts featuring two AI voices discussing the content as if they are two humans who have just finished reading about it.
All this implies that, as of this moment, every exchange of information can be effortlessly personalized and can cater to an individual’s situational needs and preferences. This will be achieved by routing knowledge transfers through a central AI assistant. Instead of holding a meeting where employees take turns presenting possibly redundant and/or unnecessary information to one another, the employees will instead send daily updates to, and receive daily updates from, a central AI assistant, at a time, and in the medium, of their choosing.
What would this look like in practice? Consider the following example, featuring the same 10 persons from before.
Person 1 might begin his or her workday during the morning commute by listening to a ‘podcast’ produced by the central AI, in which yesterday’s pertinent updates from only persons 3 and 4 are discussed. Person 1 would then have all the information needed to get to work. Person 1 might conclude his or her workday, hours later, by jotting down on a piece of paper—if that is the preferred way to record efforts—all of the important updates from that workday before uploading a photograph of that piece of paper back into the central AI.
Person 2 might begin the morning by reading a bulleted list—if he or she prefers to ingest information through bulleted lists—concerning all the updates from only persons 5 and 6. During the workday, person 2 may require updates from person 4 as well. He or she would then ask the central AI for these updates, and would receive them immediately, again in the bulleted list form as preferred. Person 2 might conclude the workday by recording a rambling audio file on the drive home, containing everything accomplished that day, and which is later uploaded to the central AI. Naturally, person 2 can also jot down the daily efforts on a piece of paper like person 1 did, but he or she prefers to talk things through, and the central AI accommodates all forms of information streams.
Person 3 might begin the morning by viewing a PowerPoint presentation on the updates from persons 5 through 10, as that is his or her preferred way to receive information. Person 3 might realize previous updates from person 5 going back over a month have been forgotten and would then ask the central AI for these backdated updates, and would receive them at once, again in the preferred format of a PowerPoint presentation. Person 3 might conclude the workday by typing a bulleted list of all that had been done that day, if that is his or her preference, before uploading that list into the central AI.
And so on for every member of the team, with each individual receiving, and submitting, personalized information in the form of their choosing, and at a time convenient to them.
The entire task force would still meet in person occasionally, of course, either because large decisions needed to be made, or perhaps because they just enjoy one another’s company. Importantly, however, they would have avoided wasting a lot of one another’s time in the interim.
A better way of doing things
Another famous quote on meetings says “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of this meeting” in an obvious reference to how unproductive meetings can be.
For decades, meeting attendees have been frustrated about having had so much of their time wasted. Thanks to AI, there finally exists a better way of making meetings more effective. No longer must employees struggle to remain awake as information previously known or not relevant to them drones in the background. Instead, they will be free to engage with only the information they require, at the time of their choosing, and always in the format they most prefer.
Now is the time to start getting things done.
