Did You Invite AI to the meeting?
Devices like Alexa and Google Home are getting smarter every day. And while it’s fun and all to be able to tell it to play music or order a Lyft — one as yet untapped arena where it could really blow up, is in business.
Imagine this — you’re in a meeting and sitting in the middle of the table is a small speaker-assistant documenting everything everyone is saying, awaiting orders:
Can you pull up the presentation on screen?
What sites are performing better than ours this month? How we do compare?
Eek, can you email everyone who’s using the conference room at 2pm and tell them that we’re going to be running a few minutes late?
This AI software knows everything there is to know about your company, from your employees, to your files, calendars, budgets, and can instantaneously produce anything for you. And it meticulously takes minutes so nothing gets lost.
And since the assistant could be at everyone’s desk as well, after a meeting, you can easily ask it to remind you what Carl said earlier about the TPS reports.
While the assistant in this scenario is a still a ways off, Google is most poised to be the first to market. Why? Because of a little app called Google Drive … you know the thing that over 3 million businesses use? That means that if and when they choose to launch this product, businesses will have an assistant that’s already sync’ed with a large chunk of their company’s essential data. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s already testing this internally.
And what app might this new device come with? My money’s on an Agenda app. Within Drive, it would let you create an agenda for each meeting, then would essentially help you run it — queuing up appropriate media, handling time management. It would constantly be learning and could make suggestions for future meetings. And of course, it’s smart enough to automatically add items to the next meeting that you didn’t get to because you spent the last 15 minutes talking about Carl’s inane theory that Ned Stark is still alive (HE’S NOT CARL, OK?!? HE DIED, LIKE IN THE FIRST SEASON. GET THE ‘NET BRO).
It also opens the door for additional hardware, as Google (Office?) could be bundled with a large e-whiteboard/screen that documents every stat, detail … even inspirational quotes:
And if you open it up to 3rd party apps, the sky’s the limit.
Changing the culture of meetings.
These days, sitting around a conference table full of people, usually means sitting around a table full of illuminated white Apple logos. But because the assistant is doing nearly everything that you’d need to be doing on your laptop, you don’t need to bring it with you anymore. This allows everyone in the meeting to be more present, come up with better ideas, and have more meaningful exchanges. An unfortunate consequence though, is that while Carl is droning on about his great idea for a sure-fire marketing campaign that is like a cat cafe meets American Gladiators, with a hint of Shark Tank –––– you can’t as easily escape the cold, bitter reality of Carl’s existence with something, anything on your laptop (and still make it look like you’re working).
It’s hard not to see how this won’t be commonplace in a few years, an invisible coworker who makes meetings more efficient, and lives and breathes the words of Bachman Turner Overdrive. Though isn’t it also possible that not long after that, this same office assistant will literally takes a seat in a chair as well?
