Our team love AI meeting note-taking tools! We have access to them via Microsoft Copilot for 365, and it’s probably our favourite and most useful feature – it does a fantastic job of summarising key points and actions.
We’re increasingly seeing AI services such as Otter and Firefly added to meetings, and understandably this is sometimes causing a little unease. If you’ve not seen it, these services often come into the meeting as a participant, and this does feel a little strange. Maybe we need to establish an etiquette for this?
Let’s start with the issues though. These services record elements of the meeting, such as sound and images, and send them to an AI service to process. They can be in the form of a ‘bot’ that actually attends the meeting, or as features built into the meeting software, for example, Copilot for 365.
When using any AI services for work, our advice is never to enter personal or private information into an AI service unless your employer has a contract in place. This means due diligence will have been done on data security, etc.
The issue with AI meeting services though is if someone else invites the bot, you have no idea what due diligence they have done.
As we’ve said though, these services are fantastically useful, so we think we need a new etiquette. We’ve gradually established such things for online meetings, so, for example, you wouldn’t normally invite someone else to a meeting if you aren’t the meeting organiser. It feels like the same should be true of AI meeting services. We’d suggest you shouldn’t invite any service to the meeting if you aren’t the organiser, at least without asking the organiser first. And you should only do this if your organisation has a contract in place for the service.
We think that meeting organisers should be the ones to arrange any AI note-taking, in the same way as they might organise a human note-taker, but should also take responsibility for ensuring due diligence and contracts are in place.
So how about this:
- Don’t invite an AI note-taking service to a meeting if you aren’t the organiser.
- If you are the organiser, only use a tool if your institution has a contract in place for it.
- If you are the organiser and you are using such a tool, let everyone know at the start of the meeting, and give them the chance to object, in which case you will turn it off.
These tools are fantastically helpful and useful, and we’d hate to see them get a bad name, so does this help us navigate where things are now and strike the right balance?
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