Name: Meeting bots.
Age: Relatively new.
Appearance: Soulless drones attending your monthly planning meeting.
That sounds like everyone who attends our monthly meetings. Exactly – they fit in so well that often nobody notices.
Notices what? That they are not people, they are AI-powered entities.
You mean robot spies? It’s more of a virtual workspace tool – a bot assistant that accompanies you to your online meeting.
What’s the point of that? The bot takes notes so you don’t have to, and if you are late to the meeting it will catch you up on the discussion so far.
That sounds creepy, but sort of handy. You can also expect a critique of your behaviour afterwards.
From whom? From the bot. The latest AI post-meeting reports offer tips on improving your speaking style and will gently reprimand you for going on too long or interrupting too much.
If the bot thinks it knows so much about meetings, it can go on its own. They often do. Increasingly, managers are skipping meetings and relying on the bots for a summary of who was there and what was said, including a run-down of the gossip.
In the future only bots will go to meetings. The future is here. Marketing director Colin Dougherty recently found himself the sole human in a virtual meeting, the only others present being robot notetakers. “It was like, super-dystopian,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
It sounds perfect to me, Colin’s only mistake was turning up. He might never have known. Bots are usually labelled as “so-and-so’s notetaker”, but their senders sometimes blur the lines by giving them humanoid profiles.
How do you recognise a bot in a meeting – any tips? They tend to turn up on time.
What a giveaway. Still, I’d be sort of relieved to find out some manager was actually a faceless robot with no feelings. That is perhaps the thinking behind Ms Bailey.
Who is Ms Bailey? She’s the new principal headteacher at Cottesmore school in West Sussex.
And she’s a fan of AI? Abigail Bailey is AI – an algorithmic tool designed to offer advice to students.
How very forward-thinking. Cottesmore was the first school in the country to hire its own head of AI.
Oh yeah? Who did they get? Jamie Rainer.
Never heard of him. Is he some sort of industry expert with a background in digital … Oh wait, he’s a robot too, isn’t he? You guessed it.
Do say: “Don’t mind me, I’m just here to listen. And remember.”
Don’t say: “So if there are no humans present, now might be a good time to have that chat about taking over the planet.”
