Transforming meetings and management with AI

As the initial period of novelty for new tech gives way to tangible utility, we’ll discover unexpected transformations.

AI-driven meetings will be reimagined as drastically more efficient, shorter, and evaluated for ROI. Management will also be reimagined from the ground up in the age of AI, giving rise to “intelligent organisations”.

The “intelligent organisation” is a modern construct for how we should spend and manage our most precious resource – human energy – in the pursuit of progress and advancing our respective industries. Since the earliest incarnations of businesses, we have clung to a structure of management that scales by adding layers, and an operating model that brings us together (and takes us away from actual “doing” work) to learn and share information and make decisions slowly. We spend too much time getting aligned in lieu of making decisions. We all know how expensive and inefficient meetings are, and we all know how unprepared and ineffective managers can be. How might new technology transform the way we meet and manage?

• “Meetings” will be deconstructed from the hot random mess they typically are, liberating time and vastly improving the productivity of gathering people offline. If you believe that time is the most valuable asset in a company, then meetings are every company’s most expensive activity. The most worthwhile meetings are either super small and focused on solving a specific problem, or are incredibly contentious. Passionate debate representing very different approaches to tough problems is humans at their best. So, imagine a world where the problems to be solved are 10x more clear, where people’s ideas and positions are clearly classified and presented upfront, and meetings are only scheduled to debate rather than to commentate and summarise. In such a world, what types of collaborative work should be synchronous or asynchronous? What new products, platforms, and company norms emerge as a result? With the rise of automatic transcription and AI analysis, there is an opportunity to measure and score meetings (and participants) to offer an audit and feedback loop.

• New alternatives to traditional meetings will emerge that unbundle the many elements, objectives, and expectations of meetings. If you unbundle a meeting, you’ll see a number of distinct parts like bringing people up to speed, sharing strategy and inspiring the group, getting alignment from colleagues, getting approvals from leaders, framing a problem, and debating a problem. There are also the less quantifiable outcomes like socialising new ideas, building rapport with a team, and spontaneous fun. Instead of trying to accomplish all of this in a room, where are the point solutions that make parts of this 10x better? As always, great new tech brings us back to the way things once were, but with more scale and efficiency. Imagine an artificially intelligent filter that helps us determine who should (and shouldn’t) be in a meeting, what the agenda should be, and what actions are required? I think we will find that computers are much better at allocating human time than humans.

• AI-powered management tools will isolate problems and decisions, and then streamline decisiveness. I’ve talked about the notion of “organisational debt” for years, which I define as the accumulation of decisions in an organisation that should have been made but weren’t. As a result, teams (and entire companies) show signs of atrophy as ambitious people move forward without alignment while other people “wait” for answers and get out of sync, and careers falter. Organisational debt is not reduced by having more meetings. It is only reduced through better management and decisiveness. I’ve seen at least two companies reimagining management practices to be AI-driven. And while it sounds crazy at first that we might “work for a computer,” I firmly believe that management will become a hybrid (human-machine) discipline. One thing the start-up and corporate worlds have in common is being plagued by inexperienced and bad managers who have no idea how to monitor and measure performance, how to lead without micromanaging, how to run a 1:1 or manage careers responsibly. Why not assist these managers with AI that crunches the data and suggests what to ask and do when? (And yes, I could use some of this support as well!) Imagine an AI assistant that partners with you throughout every management experience – from giving feedback to your team, identifying red flags in performance, suggesting goals to set and motivational advice to share, and making decisions about rewards. Such an AI assistant would help remove cognitive bias and inform management practices with real data.

• Humans will do more leadership and less management in the age of AI. While I am forecasting a transformation in management, leadership remains critical and human. Bold and counterintuitive visions are what sustain progress. “More of the same” (aka everyday management) always fails organisations over time. The flag planting, ethics setting, charismatic choreographers of an organisation will be more essential than ever before. One might say that AI will liberate managers from all the process stuff to focus more on leadership. And perhaps we’ll have fewer managers and more leaders as a result? Let us make it so.