Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to streamline meetings, solve underlying issues during meetings, and make them more productive.
Meetings, whether online or offline, are important for every professional and business. This enables teams to discuss crucial issues or strategies over a short discussion.
However, preparing for a meeting and making it successful is not that easy. It takes a lot of brainstorming, creating agendas, documenting, editing, presentation, scheduling, and more.
If you do all of it manually, it could consume a lot of time and effort and may involve certain inefficiencies and errors.
This could affect the meeting and the outcome. Hence, you need a solution for all the meeting challenges you face.
You can leverage the potential of artificial intelligence to fuel your meetings, manage them like a pro, and make them successful.
In this article, I’ll discuss some of the challenges associated with meetings and how AI can solve them.
Let’s start!
Managing Time
At times, online meetings can stretch beyond the allotted time. This could be tiresome and inconvenient for the attendees since they might have other commitments after the meeting.
Similarly, if the meeting doesn’t start at the right time, it creates problems. This keeps people waiting, which no one likes in this fast-paced world. This might also hint that the host is not that serious about valuing other people’s time. As a result, some of them might leave the session, which can affect your agenda.
Therefore, it’s necessary to manage the meeting time properly. This will enable all the attendees to join the meeting, have a great discussion, complete it at the right time, and then go back to their commitments.
AI solution: AI can help you manage your online meetings and make the event successful. For this, there are AI tools to monitor the progress of your online meetings so that you can ensure the correct timing is maintained from the beginning to the end.
Apart from monitoring, AI tools can send reminders when it’s time to wrap up. Thus, you can conclude the meeting properly instead of doing it in a hurry.
Scheduling the Meeting
Whether it’s an online or offline meeting, scheduling can be really challenging. It requires you to find a suitable date and time that works for all the participants. And given how busy everyone is nowadays, it becomes tricky to bring everyone together at a time, even if it’s online.
In addition, there are other challenges during the scheduling process, such as referring to calendars, coordinating with your team, resolving conflicts, and more.
AI solution: With AI, the process of scheduling a meeting becomes easier. It not only can streamline the scheduling process but also make it more efficient. You can get a reliable AI-powered scheduling tool to simplify this process. It can analyze the schedules of each attendee and, depending on their availability, suggest preferable meeting times.
Furthermore, these AI tools are designed to consider the attendees’ other factors like time zones they belong to, travel time, etc. to suggest suitable times for meetings. In addition, the tool can resolve conflicts related to scheduling and send invites to attendees automatically.
For scheduling, you can use the tools like Reclaim.ai, Clockwise, etc.
Setting a Clear Agenda
Sometimes, the agenda of a meeting may not be clear to the attendees or host. This means nobody has a clear understanding of what the topic of the discussion is, which defies the overall purpose of participating in a meeting in the first place.
Also, coming up with an effective agenda is not that easy. It takes hours of thorough research, discussions, organization, documentation, and corrections.
As a result, people can easily divert from the discussion or have different expectations than what’s really going on in the session. This can make the meeting counterproductive, and the goal of the meeting would seem distant to achieve.
AI solution: AI can help create your meeting agenda even on a priority basis. It can automate the process of building the agenda to save plenty of effort and time. It can help you research, organize, document, format, and correct your agenda automatically.
In addition, AI tools can present the agenda in a way that is well-organized and easy to read. This saves you from manually gathering and formatting data.
Handling Repetitive Tasks
Conducting a meeting involves a lot of repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as planning, research, manual data entry, documentation, organization, sending invites, etc. So, if you invest most of your time in these mundane tasks, you won’t have sufficient time for creativity and improvements. Thus, it will affect your organization’s growth.
AI Solution: If you use AI tools to automate these repetitive processes, you can save plenty of your time. Using an AI meeting assistant, you can streamline the meeting preparations, sending invites and follow-ups, and other tasks.
It can help you with agenda generation, documenting the details of the meeting, scheduling meetings, sending invitations, sending alerts and notifications, and much more.
Session Recording
If some crucial things are discussed in the meeting, you might want to get back to it and later implement it in your learnings or project. The reason is a lot of things might be discussed in the meeting and it’s not possible to remember everything. For this, you may want to record an ongoing meeting so that you can get back to it and refer to the points discussed in it.
However, not all online meeting services offer this feature of recording meeting sessions. So, you may lose important discussions or points forever. This might impact your project or your understanding of a subject or topic you are learning about.
AI solution: AI tools can help record the entire meeting so you don’t lose anything discussed in it. You can play the recorded session again and understand important topics. This will help you complete your projects and assignments if the stepwise procedures are explained in the meeting.
Some AI tools you can use to record meeting sessions include Loom, Fathom, Fireflies, etc.
Summarize the Meeting
If you were unable to attend a meeting due to any reason, getting a summary of the points discussed in it can really be of help. And even if you have attended the meeting, a summary can still be helpful.
A comprehensive, well-designed summary of the meeting will include key action items, decisions, outcomes, procedures, etc. But if you try summarizing the meeting by yourself, it could consume a lot of time and effort and may incur certain errors and inaccuracies.
AI solution: You can leverage AI to summarize the meeting. An AI tool can help you achieve that so you can capture the important points, decisions, and other details and utilize them in your learnings or work.
You can just use this tool to get a comprehensive, well-formatted, and documented summary. Thus, whether you have attended the meeting or not, you can understand the whole gist of the meeting by going through this summary. This will give you complete clarity on the discussed topics with accuracy.
This also makes it hassle-free for the attendees so they don’t have to take notes during the session and lose important details in the process. They can attend the meeting with full focus and fulfill the goal of joining the meeting.
Some of the tools you can use for meeting summarization are MeetGeek, Sembly, Otter, etc.
Also read: MeetGeek Automatic Meeting Summaries: Your AI Meeting Mastery Tool
Analyzing Data
Gaining insights about the performance of your meetings is important. It will help you find the underlying issues during the meeting, whether it’s related to the agenda, scheduling, time, coordination, or anything else.
You can analyze this data to fix those issues and improve your meetings. It will ensure that the attendees will have a smooth meeting experience without conflicts or hassles.
So, when the meeting is completed, you must employ some ways to measure how the meeting went and the positives and negatives of the session. But if you don’t measure this data, you will never come to know about the issues, which can impact your next sessions.
AI Solution: AI-powered analytics can help you gather useful analytics and insights to help improve your meetings and make them more effective. Many tools in the market can help you gather virtual meeting data, such as video, audio, notes, attendance, engagement, participation, outcomes, time management, efficiency, agenda usage, and more.
In addition, AI-powered analytics tools can present this information in an easy-to-understand, structured format. This way, it becomes easier for you to understand the data by looking at it. Thus, you can find the issues quickly, track the progress of your meetings over time, and make required improvements.
Furthermore, AI tools to fetch the details enable you to have a bigger picture of your virtual meetings, gauging how the meetings are going and what things worked and what didn’t. This can lead to better meetings and efficiencies in your future meetings.
Some AI tools to gather meeting analytics are Gong, Chorus.ai, and more.
Effective Collaboration and Communication
Communication gaps among the attendees in a meeting can lead to reduced coordination. But the overall idea of conducting a meeting is to have a healthy discussion in order to come to a conclusion and the goal of the meeting.
Sometimes, the language could be the barrier between attendees or certain physical disabilities. Also, the attendees in a meeting might be new to each other, so starting a conversation may seem a challenge for them. To this, the host must ensure to create such an environment that everyone can meet each other virtually and get comfortable engaging in a discussion.
But if that’s not maintained, it will impact team collaboration. Similarly, if you are conducting an online class, you will need to ensure all your students get a healthy learning environment and tools to communicate with you in need.
AI solution: AI-powered software can reduce the communication gap among the attendees of a meeting. It offers capabilities like natural language processing, speech recognition, language translation, etc.
In order to make the meeting more productive, get the attendees familiar with the agenda in advance by sending them a well-documented agenda. This will enable them to prepare for the meeting and stay focused during the session.
Furthermore, you can use AI tools for collaboration during meetings. It comes with features like data sharing, real-time communication and document editing, virtual whiteboard, project management, and more. With these features, you can enable your teams to effectively work together.
Thus, if anyone among the attendees wants to add something, they can use a feature of hand raising (many software supports this feature). The host can unmute the attendees and allow them to speak. Similarly, through real-time document editing, multiple users can access and edit a single document for corrections or to make some suggestions.
Some of the AI tools you can use for enhancing communication and collaboration are ClickUp, Spacemaker, Voice App for translation, etc.
Making Informed Decisions
Many times, making a good decision becomes difficult for teams, even after hours of discussions. And if you can’t come to a particular decision or make decisions in a hurry without measuring everything, the whole purpose of having a meeting seems to be meaningless.
One bad decision can impact your whole organization and its aspects. That’s why making informed, right decisions at the right time is necessary.
AI Solution: AI can help streamline the decision-making process. Using AI tools, you can gain real-time data, perform accurate analysis, and leverage predictive modeling to make more informed, data-driven decisions.
In addition, AI can help improve meetings by:
- Enabling real-time language translation
- Taking meeting notes
- Automatically transcribing meetings
- Integrating multiple tools so users can access various tools from one interface
- Securing meetings with advanced encryptions, MFA, and other methods
- Helping you maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, etc.
AI tools you can use for decision-making include Rationale, Scaler, etc.
AI Meeting Assistants
Now, let’s talk about some AI tools in brief that can help you streamline your meetings and make them more effective.
#1. MeetGeek
Use MeetGeek, an all-in-one AI meeting assistant that works with all platforms, including Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet. It will enhance the value of your meetings, customer calls, and hiring interviews.
The AI tool can automatically record meeting videos and summarize meetings, transcribe them, and share insights about them. MeetGeek can automate everything, from note-taking and transcribing to coordinating decisions.
The tool organizes all the meeting details securely in a searchable location and lets you enrich your libraries by adding audio files and transcripts. It integrates with 2000+ apps via Zapier along with many other tools.
#2. Otter
Make your meetings highly productive and make the most out of them with Otter. It offers key takeaways, notes, and live transcriptions. It will also help you plan and schedule your meetings by connecting Otter with Microsoft or Google Calendar.
Otter works with platforms like Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet. You can capture recordings in real-time for you to refer to later and tag your teammates with various action items to give them an idea about the meeting. Otter can also create automated summaries with hyperlinks and email them to participants.
#3. Laxis
Laxis can empower teams by simplifying meetings and capturing key insights from customer interactions. Over 20k+ professionals trust this AI meeting assistant that can help you stay focused on the meetings, flag items to follow up later, and capture comments.
The tool also captures meeting outcomes and helps you make clear decisions. It offers personalized templates to focus on conversations. It also offers real-time transcriptions, tagging, world-class editing, audio-to-text features, and integration with popular tools.
Conclusion
With artificial intelligence, you can make your meetings productive and successful since it can help you streamline almost every aspect of your meetings. From planning, agenda creation, and documentation to scheduling the meeting, inviting members, and conducting the meeting, AI can help you all the way.
You may also explore some best agenda templates for more productive meetings.