The evolution of AI-aided meeting summary technologies offers significant potential for enhancing productivity and collaboration. These tools can transform meetings by transcribing and summarizing discussions, in theory, allowing participants to focus on active listening and idea-sharing instead of notetaking. Among the vendors who are offering meeting summary tools:
While AI can streamline information sharing and democratize access to meeting insights, it is essential to address the potential shortcomings, such as imperfect summaries and specific formatting needs, to fully realize its benefits and foster innovation in team collaboration.
Cresta CMO Russell Banzon explained participants can be most engaged in a meeting by focusing on the person they are listening to in the conversation, noting AI meeting recaps can help improve active listening by eliminating note taking.
"While we can’t lean entirely on AI to perfectly summarize all of our meetings, the technology can help by transcribing and summarizing to allow for increased engagement and idea-sharing," he said.
Banzon said when implementing this type of technology for the first time, he typically recommends starting with a specific group in the organization that are more likely to be the "innovators" of the group.
From there, highlight the value to them, get them implemented quickly, and nurture the success stories.
"With the group that’s seeing success, you can have them share the stories with the rest of the organization to have both a leader-driven and grassroots approach," he said. " This will drive the fastest and most effective change when implementing."
Bo Yan, head of product, AI at Zoom, said one of the more beneficial steps one can take when implementing AI-powered meeting recap tools is to educate the team on how to use the technology and how to harness it to maximize its value.
"Some examples of this include hosting training sessions for your team, setting up a dedicated chat channel so that employees can ask questions, and creating a task force of experts to help people use the technology effectively," he said.
Yan added another factor to consider when implementing AI-generated meeting recap tools is return on investment (ROI).
"Leaders should also consider the toggle tax; employees aren’t as productive when they’re toggling between different tasks and applications all day," he said. "Leaders should choose a solution that enables them to get all their work done in one platform."
Lux Narayan, CEO and co-founder of StreamAlive, explained AI meeting recaps can improve communication across teams and reallocate time and resources away from notetaking.
"With AI tools leveraged during meetings, team members can shift their focus toward engaging in discussion with team members, brainstorming and collaborating with one another, and enjoying seamless discussion as opposed to focusing entirely on taking notes," he said.
He added many tools offer post-meeting recaps that can be used to quickly understand the content and takeaways from a meeting.
However, implementing AI meeting bots to save time requires acknowledging that it may cause employees to become complacent and less engaged during meetings.
Narayan suggested that after implementation, organizations should create various engagement opportunities in meetings to facilitate discussion, maintain attention, and prevent monotony.
"Go beyond pausing for questions," he said. "Use polls, maps, games, and other interactive activities to keep the audience engaged."
When it comes to planning integration of AI-aided summarization features in collaboration platforms, the primary stakeholders can be broken out into two groups: the users and the technical team.
Banzon explained the end-users will need to be trained and prepared to incorporate AI-aided summarization features into their workflows.
"They need to know how best to capture the benefits of the solution," he said.
The technical team will typically be within IT, which will be the team implementing the solution.
He said doing technical scoping, figuring out how best to deploy it into the workflows of the team, and, depending on the AI-summarization solution, tuning the models and how the summarization appears in different platforms.
Yan said when making those determinations, it’s best to look at the AI capabilities offered as well as the total cost of ownership, considering the upfront cost, as well as what you pay down the line.
"It’s important to be strategic when integrating an additional tool; you need to think about your entire tech stack and consider upfront and long-term costs," he said.
Banzon cautioned that at this stage, AI-powered meeting recaps are not perfect in summarizing the exact things you may want in the summary or creating them in the formats that you need.
"Some use case specific solutions can do this, but it’s important to identify the use cases you need the meeting summaries for and choose the solution accordingly," he said.
He added meeting recaps don’t always get done effectively and efficiently, because many lack accuracy or key points from the conversation.
This leaves those reading the notes or summaries later without the information they may need.
"By having these automatically captured and summarized every time, it democratizes information within the organization with accuracy and speed," Banzon said.
