The bots have infiltrated the office meeting—and it could spell disaster for companies around the world.
As AI begins to seep into our daily lives, new technology from Microsoft, Zoom, and Google now allows people to skip Zoom meetings and send robot notetakers on their behalf. The practice is still in its infancy, but has already gained some traction, according to the Wall Street Journal, and it’s not hard to see why. Between scheduling conflicts, long aimless meetings, and work overload, bosses and employees alike are ready to pounce on any option that helps them reclaim some of their time.
But you may want to press pause before sending your bot into your next 9 a.m. Experts tell Fortune that what might begin as a productivity aid could turn into a not-so-subtle power move that breeds toxicity. And in time, the mainstream adoption of sending bots to meetings might destroy work relationships, hurt more vulnerable employees, and corrode office culture.
“I'm afraid for what [this] means for the way we develop communication, the way we do meetings, and the way we organize ourselves,” says Jeanine Turner, a professor of management and director of the communication, culture and technology program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
“What we're doing is squeezing time out of our organizations,” she says, adding that in the name of efficiency bots could rob employees of the opportunity to deepen connections. “We're becoming more and more distant, alienated, and isolated from each other.”
It’s a bad look for managers
The first problem with using bots as meeting avatars has to do with basic etiquette.
“It says you're not important enough. This meeting is not important enough for me to be here synchronously, so I'm sending this other technology,” Turner says. In her mind, that’s more offensive than politely declining the invitation. The message is: I can get what I need without interacting with you.
Managers in particular, she says, need to think about the message they might send by dispatching a bot rather than showing up for a meeting. How will the bot’s presence impact the person who called the meeting? What will it say to others about the manager’s view of that individual? And as a role model, are you setting the right example?
Rank and file workers could suffer the most
But it’s not just managers at risk from the new technology. If the practice of sending bots to meetings takes hold and more employees embrace the habit, more vulnerable members of the corporate world could be adversely impacted.
Women caring for children or aging parents, people with chronic health concerns, or workers from underrepresented groups tired of Zoom microaggressions all have good reason to sometimes miss a video meeting. But that reduces their visibility within an organization, Turner explains. Innocent attempts to deal with work overload in the short term will actually undermine workers’ power and agency in the long term.
Gen Z employees in particular could be hard hit by AI bots in meetings. Companies are already concerned about the missing social skills of young people entering the workforce; this cohort needs as much practice as possible dealing with various personality types and having real-time interactions, and learning how to navigate sensitive topics, says Turner.
On that last point, they aren’t alone, she adds. In her research, she sees people across generations increasingly shrinking from tough live conversations inside workplaces, and fears that the bots will offer an easy way out of meetings that they fear could become contentious.
They’re bad for employee bonding and culture
Bots might be able to create a transcript, but they’ll never truly capture the emotional undercurrent, or the group bonding over a had-to-be-there moment.
Workers will miss out on nonverbal cues, offhand comments, as well as the mood, and tone of their coworkers. If you send a bot to a meeting instead of attending yourself, you’ll never “bring up that weird thing that happened in the meeting later to joke about,” Turner says.
Those kinds of informal conversations allow people to create bonds with their colleagues, and engender trust, which isn’t just a feel-good benefit. Companies are more productive and profitable when their employees feel socially connected and engaged, as Gallup notes, while widespread disengagement leads to higher levels of turnover and other problems that can affect a company’s bottom line.
What’s more, Turner adds, a huge part of company culture is built during casual hallway conversations before or after official meetings. Your trusty AI assistant won’t even be present for those.
Masking bigger problems
Bots in meetings might also disguise other problems that prompted the need for a bot in the first place, according to Yoram Kalman, an associate professor at the Open University of Israel, who studies technology and communication.
People might use AI notetakers because meetings are scheduled at the wrong time, or the person running the meeting may be known to drone on, or because employees may feel that it’s senseless to go to most meetings because their voice doesn’t matter, he says. The AI bots won’t fix any of these problems.
“The absurd comes out when you're just doing something that's not working well and then making it more efficient,” he told Fortune. Meeting bots could be misused as a way to further institutionalize a practice that should be rethought altogether, according to Kalman. “Trying to imitate or replicate face-to-face using technology is always going to be inferior to the real thing,” he says.
Instead, he urges leaders to leverage AI for other purposes. An AI bot that’s listening to a board meeting may be able to detect groupthink and flag it, Kalman suggests, or play devil’s advocate. Within a company, it could help schedule company meetings so they are held at the time of day that best suits their purpose (for example, people are more creative in the afternoons), or make them more convenient to all staff, supporting inclusion goals. Right now, he notes, meetings are typically planned to suit the needs of an organization’s most powerful employees.
As these new technologies emerge, leaders might want to if not stop the practice now—set up explicit guidelines for best practices. Otherwise, Turner cautions, that kind of social behavior has a way of becoming entrenched quickly, especially when we’re not paying attention. Her advice: "We have to communicate about the way we want to communicate."
Do you have insight to share? Got a tip? Contact Lila MacLellan at lila.maclellan@fortune.com or through secure messaging app Signal at 646-820-9525.
