Now low-cost AI meeting agents can record, transcribe, summarize, and assign tasks from your meetings. It’s a huge performance boost for executives and potentially for your whole org. Keep reading to learn how!
Meetings Need Notes
As an executive, you’re in a lot of meetings. Some people prefer to take their own notes so they can remember the details while others delegate that task so they can pay full attention to the conversation. Still others aren’t good at taking notes at all, and you end up with meetings where attendees forget the tasks they agreed to do or the context surrounding them, so they can’t follow up effectively.
AI to the Rescue!
Fortunately, some cool tech has been coming online to help everyone involved. Automated transcriptions have for years meant that machines can capture (almost) every word so that we have searchable notes of every meeting. And after the pandemic pushed most meetings to the web, these cool little transcription tools started popping up which you can invite to join your online meetings, and they automatically transcribe everything, correctly decerning exactly who said what.
The introduction of large language models (LLMs) in the AI world means those automated transcribers can understand the context of the conversation and create nearly 100% accurate transcriptions. That alone has been enough to convince some technophiles to start adopting. But it’s getting even better.
State of the Art – AI Meeting Agents
Lately, I’ve had some meeting attendees inviting Otter (https://otter.ai) to attend, record, and transcribe our conversations. A few months ago, it was nothing special, but now it takes exact notes and summarizes really nicely. Even better, a member of my peer advisory board has embraced Fathom (https://fathom.video). To show it off, he sent me a summary that Fathom created from a meeting where it recorded the whole thing, transcribed every utterance, summarized the major topics of discussion complete with indices into the video, and extracted tasks and assigned them to the appropriate attendees. I’ve since heard from other AI experts that Fathom is the cutting edge of this technology with a great product.
My board member even says that he’s found it to be a nice little executive life-hack. He receives invitations to meetings that he doesn’t need to personally attend but will accept them so that his Fathom account will join the meeting, record it, and summarize it with task assignments. Fathom will email him the results within minutes of the meeting’s completion, but he can review them all at the end of the day, just to stay on top of everything going on with his leadership.
If you’re a busy executive in a growing organization and in the process of kicking off new projects and delegating to new staff, this is an awesome capability that we’ve never had before!
Here They Come!
If you’re an early adopter type, you’ll probably want to jump on Fathom right now (or even already have). But if you’re more of a laggard, don’t worry. Zoom, Google, and Microsoft all have AI’s available to record and transcribe their respective meetings (for a small fee). And with the addition of LLMs providing context, these rapidly evolving AI agents will all be delivering huge value in short order.
START Using AI Meeting Agents Now!
My advice to you is this: Embrace this valuable new capability sooner rather than later because it’s a major productivity enhancer! It will make you personally better organized, better able to follow-up on important responsibilities, and better able to prep for subsequent meetings.
And for your staff, too: If they’re regularly meeting with clients, encourage them to embrace these tools to take notes and summarize the conversations. At the very least it will make your organization look more organized and professional, and it might even raise your quality of service as your people can spend less time summarizing meetings and more time completing the actions that come out of them.
And if you found this Tech for Execs article valuable, tell me in the comments below!
