When AI Joins Your Meeting

One of the best things about working at a company with Cisco’s resources is you get to blend fundamental technology research with macroeconomic trends. For example, the inevitable improvement of AI and collaboration technology, empowered by the global rise towards building distributed work teams, will lead to a revolution in how AI affects teamwork.

Over at Medium, I propose that there are 5 Levels of Meeting AI, starting with simple command-and-control bots that can perform the mechanics of joining meetings for us. The growth of machine intelligence and its capability to understand human and business intention will eventually lead to the development of smart AI team members who will be able to proactively advise teams and people on how to build powerful and robust new businesses opportunities.

I won’t sugar-coat the difficulties in moving AI from where we are now to where I think we’re going to get. Understanding humans in their native environment is the most difficult problem that AI researchers and engineers have to solve — much more difficult than understanding speech. But if you look at how far we’ve come in AI, how many brilliant people are working on it today, and the economic advantage of building smart team-mates… well, I think it makes the future incredibly interesting.

There’s more detail about the 5 Levels of Meeting AI at my post on Medium. Check it out.