Please Stop Inviting AI Notetakers to Meetings
Using artificial intelligence to summarize meetings raises questions around etiquette, privacy and the purpose of meeting in the first place.
Illustration: Joonho Ko for Bloomberg
Move over, “This meeting could have been an email.” The new office complaint could soon be, “Who invited the AI notetaker?”
Microsoft Corp., Google and a bunch of much smaller firms have all rolled out artificial intelligence-powered notetaking tools in recent months. These bots listen in on meetings, transcribe what was said and summarize key points. The tech companies behind them might frame it as a step forward in efficiency, but the technology raises troubling questions around etiquette and privacy and risks undercutting the very communication it’s meant to improve.