Early in 2021, the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab looked at the psychological consequences of spending long days videoconferencing and in virtual meetings. The popularized term “Zoom fatigue,” is the result of maxing out cognitive load and even reducing effectiveness. For all of that investment in remote work technology, senior managers feel there is very little payoff.

The University of North Carolina surveyed 182 senior managers and 65% of them felt meetings kept them from completing their own work, 71% felt meetings were inefficient and unproductive, and 64% felt meetings undercut deep thinking.

As technology-dependent remote workers proliferate, new solutions are coming to the fore that may make both in-person and virtual meetings more productive.

Innovative Vision In The Meeting Space

Meetings occur to present, exchange, and communicate information. Whether someone is present or is watching a recording, most only pick up a fraction of what is said. Most information is lost or soon forgotten.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can mimic the human brain’s ability to categorize and prioritize information. The data from meetings can be analyzed in similar ways, parsing out points of high importance, and filtering out those of low importance.

Gil Makleff, former CEO of UMT Consulting Group (now EY), and Artem Koren, former CTO of Visual Trading Systems are two industry leaders in this space who are working to improve this problem with Sembly. Their background in technology innovation led them to their vision for AI in the meeting space: “We started Sembly to leverage meeting content to help organizations get ahead of costly failures, while providing opportunistic insights that were not possible before the advent of sophisticated natural language understanding. These are encapsulated in SnowPiercer and Kodama, our proprietary AI-powered technologies for the modern enterprise.” 

Their approach is based on improving the employee experience: “AI technology is vital for organizations that want to increase cross-team information flow and drive results in an increasingly remote working environment.” 

Improving The Employee Experience 

In the past year and a half, organizations have had to adapt to remote or hybrid work environments. This has necessitated new communication methods, which have brought friction even in the most technologically adept companies. It is critical to maintain focus on the employee experience through this massive shift in work practices to ensure the workforce stays engaged and productive.

Online meeting technology is shifting from something that was required to bridge the constraint of physical distance to being a knowledge and productivity tool. Makleff and Koren  came together to create proprietary algorithms that transcribe and analyze operational meetings, using that data to deliver actionable insights. A SaaS platform, Sembly leverages the power of AI to pull out the moments that matter, enabling attendees to benefit more from meetings.  

As AI becomes increasingly advanced, platforms like Sembly can use natural language understanding to capture and concisely summarize meeting content. For example, Sembly AI’s “Glance” technology provides a topical digest of a meeting, improving people’s ability to glean the vital takeaways, cutting through the clutter and retaining the elements of highest importance.

Using Meeting Technology To Enable A Paradigm Shift

For as long as there have been meetings, there have been people taking minutes. Transcription technologies and voice AI have proved transformational for this practice. In a broad sense, transcription technology involves three processes: capturing the audio of a conversion and converting the analogue signal into digital; dividing the conversion into dialogue segments, or diarizing; automatically recognizing the speaker’s voice, or voice ID.

Technologists have come to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all for speech engines. From acoustic properties of a room to spoken accents or domains of discussion, systems used to discern speakers have required elite refinement to handle even the most basic meeting. Then, there is the fact that meetings themselves have changed dramatically.

As a platform with the capability to effectively understand and transcribe speech in professional environments, Sembly creates a durable digital artifact of a meeting stored in a Meeting Cloud. As a result, meeting contents are searchable, shareable, and can be reviewed at any time for sync-up and follow-on while maintaining strong access controls.

This is a powerful paradigm shift, when you consider that this technology enables a transformation from binary meetings to continuous information flow.  Post meeting dialogue is the wave of the future where even those who don’t participate in a meeting can access meeting content and participate in the conversation.

Attend Less: Produce More — A Collaboration Paradox? 

The Great Resignation is a particularly poignant illustration of how vital it is for employers to engage employees. Endless rounds of time-consuming meetings are certainly not aligned with employee preference or productivity. In a virtual or hybrid environment, engagement is even more challenging. AI can help employers overcome some of these challenges, with new technology used to track sentiment and engagement both in a single meeting and through a series of meetings. This data set provides insight into organizational performance, and gives leaders a finger on the pulse of organization-wide trends and collaboration.

AI makes meetings more effective by taking notes, organizing notes, distilling follow up tasks, and reducing the length of meetings overall. Present in so many of the technologies we use everyday, AI could be considered an extension of business teams: a note-taking, deliverable-assigning, meeting management machine that takes over the menial tasks, executing on them with precision and elegance.

AI fosters collaborative intelligence, adding a layer of support and maximizing insight so business leaders can make better informed decisions. Humans working in collaboration with AI achieve optimal results.