In studying the visitor column by Grace Lordan, I used to be struck by a quantity of pitfalls in her evaluation of making use of artificial intelligence applied sciences to office conferences (“Is your boss speaking an excessive amount of?”, Work & Careers, December 2).
First, I’ll acknowledge that at this time’s return-to-office intergenerational post-pandemic setting is loaded with a friction downside which, in the predominant, is technology-induced. The “cell phone, texting and apps” era contra the older “draft, edit and evaluate it earlier than you print it and distribute it” enterprise era.
Second, I additionally concur that all of us hate conferences that take up a lot time and for therefore little precise acquire. Nevertheless, I doubt if AI can help right here since there are authorized challenges to introducing AI to office conferences. Excessive on the listing is worker privateness. If AI is getting used — and is recording every participant’s voice print with out their particular person consent — then the enterprise is making a minefield in phrases of its employer-employee relationship surrounding a person worker’s proper to their knowledge and privateness.
Additional, if AI is getting used throughout office conferences which can be multinational and that cross borders — with, say, events in Europe, India, US and China — all of these places’ privateness legal guidelines and knowledge protections would have to be adhered to and complied with by the employer organisation.
Additionally, given the cyber rubbish on at this time’s web, how would AI tailor and reply to any meeting’s “specifics” with out introducing nugatory babble which has no bearing on the enterprise at hand, nor the meeting matters?
Let’s keep AI out of office conferences and away from an organization’s commerce secrets and techniques and institutional data. Such issues doubtlessly might be mentioned throughout office discourse since there isn’t any option to police and really lock knowledge saved in the cloud from conferences the place AI has been used and stop it from being hacked and disclosed.
AI could help with enhancing office minutes, which the devoted note-taker can filter by means of the inner firm’s AI platform after which distribute to all meeting contributors for added clarification and feedback, however that needs to be the restrict of AI in office conferences.
Okay Felix Mjumbe
Berkeley, CA, US