Virtual meetings have become the norm. Even as some employees return to the office, hybrid meetings, which blend in-person and virtual participants, are here to stay.

Although many of us dream of having fewer meetings in our day, meetings are essential and can foster healthy communication, alignment and decision-making processes.

The challenge, though, is to effectively manage the information shared and discussed in meetings.

Key points get lost in conversation, action items get missed, and innovative ideas go unrecorded. The cognitive burden of taking meeting minutes distracts team members from engaging in conversations and often produces inconsistent outcomes.

But there’s an emerging solution to this challenge: using artificial intelligence (AI) to make meetings smarter.

In this article, we explore how AI can help modernize meetings, making them more productive, efficient, and enjoyable.

AI goes beyond transcriptions

Many companies use meeting assistant apps to record and deliver transcripts, ensuring all facts are captured. However, it’s a widely known fact that team members rarely read these transcripts in their entirety. Even skimming them can be quite daunting.

AI can go beyond those transcriptions, and intelligently analyze conversations that happened during meetings. It can understand content and create shareable executive meeting summaries with the salient points relevant to the main topics of discussion. These executive summaries can then be automatically distributed to key stakeholders and employees – all with the help of AI.

In addition, AI can integrate with your project management platform to automatically assign tasks and action items discussed. Eliminating notetaking and automating task creation significantly reduces the time spent on follow-up conversations and alignment.

All of this allows team members to spend more time on core responsibilities, making the workforce stronger, more resilient, and efficient.

AI can capture what’s important

“Can you repeat that?”

How many times has a meeting attendee struggled to capture the important information discussed at a meeting, particularly in a hybrid environment?

With AI’s ability to create condensed notes, team members can feel at ease that every call they attend will have the key points discussed available to reference at their convenience. AI captures what’s important, filtering out interruptions, repeats, and sidebar conversations. It can also be instructed to redact sensitive information.

AI can identify keywords, themes and concepts, and analyze information to create a meaningful summary. By doing so, it can distill potentially an hour’s worth of meeting transcription into the most salient points and action items.

AI can integrate with workflows – on the spot

In the past, meetings were often followed up by manual work to document and delegate “next steps.” With AI, that’s no longer necessary.

As mentioned earlier, AI has the capability to create and assign tasks on the spot so meeting participants can exit the meeting room (virtual or in-person) with an action plan already in place.

Highly-intuitive AI can also be integrated with your PM platforms – like Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, Wrike and more – to automatically assign tasks, build bring-forward lists, and create workflows. This can significantly reduce participants’ administrative burden and allow them to focus on what’s most important, without missing any key points.

AI improves the meeting experience for everyone

Today, there isn’t a need for everyone to be at a meeting. But in our old legacy way of working, there was no way around it. It was easier to have everyone at the table, rather than repeat a version of what happened to those who weren’t in attendance – and risk it becoming distorted by bias or inaccuracies.

This old way of conducting meetings was not only frustrating, but often resulted in crowded meeting rooms and lackluster engagement. Thanks to the power of AI, this is now avoidable.

With smaller meetings that include only key stakeholders, there’s generally more engagement. These meetings become less of “talking at” meetings, and more of roundtable conversations. And who doesn’t want meetings to be about truly exchanging thoughts, brainstorming, building novel ideas and making sound decisions?

Additionally, because your meeting attendees don’t have to spend their cognitive capacity on note-taking and highlighting key ideas, they can actively participate in the conversation. This can lead to improved productivity, more engagement and overall happier workplace.

Bonus: Meeting AI can show you insights you didn’t see before

The great thing about AI is that it removes human biases in gathering insights from a meeting. While it can be challenging to distill all information presented in a meeting, it’s important to capture nuanced ideas that help spark creativity and thought leadership.

AI can surface new insights by highlighting common keywords, topics or themes that would otherwise remain buried in the meeting transcript. That means more ideas and more innovation.

Move your meetings into the future with AI

AI has come a long way from futuristic ideas of the past, and into our company HQ. With AI as a partner at our meetings, teams can collaborate in a dynamic fashion and stay focused on moving business forward.

Curious to learn more? Charli AI Meetings offers an easy and powerful way to bring AI to your meetings today. See how Charli’s unique and proven AI can help your enterprise organization deliver smarter meetings in 2022.