The Meeting That Never Happened.
Exploring how slowing down together might be the fastest way forward.
The pace at which Artificial Intelligence will transform the workplace may make you regret those never-ending meetings.
Enjoy steering committees, stand-ins and other team huddles while they last. Change is coming — meetings are leaving.
Impossible? Unrealistic? Provocative? Let’s dive in.
Meetings as a legacy technology
Remember that post-lunch meeting during which your finance colleague tried to take you through quarterly sales forecasts?
No. You probably don’t. Slides were polished, colourful bar charts standing tall and growing. Bonus in sight. You should have rejoiced.
Instead, you were just absently present. You didn’t doze off, but it was a close call.
And yet, this meeting was just one hour ago. A perfect storm: the unfriendliest timing for your metabolism, the brain going off duty, the heavy cognitive load of the content. That’s no excuse, but you had (almost) every right to take a nap during the presentation.
What if meetings themselves are a 20th-century operating system that AI is finally dismantling?
Forget the 25-minute meeting. Forget note-taking. No, better — forget AI note-takers.
Let’s challenge our very conception of work: individual activities interspersed with meetings. Or the other way around, depending on your role. Regardless, let’s challenge our thinking.
Instead of shorter meetings or better notes, we could build workflows where the very concept of synchronous gathering is irrelevant. Unnecessary. Obsolete, even.
AI-powered platforms would do what they do best:
Ingest highly specific contextual information from your ERP, your CRM, your BI tools, and what not.
Perform pattern-matching with market trends, geopolitical challenges, and cybersecurity threats.
Surface what is important for your business across different time horizons.
Summarise and customise it for each team:
With the proper lingo – the word “discount” will be carefully avoided when the report is shared with the CFO.
The right format – a good ol’ bar chart seems appropriate for our finance guy mentioned earlier.
The preferred channel – if you are an AI-powered business leader, the best way to reach you is on your connected glasses.
AI could enable a constant, rolling, context-aware dialogue across the organisation.
In fact, it would form decisions without ever needing ‘the room.’ Early signs are visible: generative AI assistants are already rewriting meeting culture. Zoom’s AI Companion, Microsoft Copilot, and Notion AI collectively process over 10 million meeting summaries daily, turning collective time into compressed snippets of insight.
Implications for commercial real estate could be drastic — but that’s a separate point.
The End of Shared Time
Let’s flip this narrative on its head.
Meetings are one of the last places where human workers inhabit the same time zone of thought.
As such, shouldn’t we treasure this ritual of synchrony?
Data already points to its erosion. According to Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index, the share of synchronous time in knowledge work has dropped by 32% since 2020, replaced by asynchronous channels like chat and email. ADP’s 2024 Workforce Study adds that hybrid employees now spend 2.5 fewer hours per week collaborating in real time. The “shared clock” is quietly disappearing.
For all their inefficiency, meetings force teams and tribes to pause their individual tasks.
They force them to enter a collective moment.
The value of meetings is not the agenda. It’s the clock.
We’re social animals. We may want and need to be alone at times, but some form of community really brings us to life. In the workplace, meetings can achieve that very goal with:
The opportunity for the soft-spoken colleague from IT to raise concerns
The opportunity for the energetic colleague from Marketing to infuse optimism
And yes, back by popular demand, the opportunity for the didactic colleague from Finance to bar chart your way to sleep.
Meetings may exacerbate tensions between colleagues. So be it. But if it’s a meeting professionally managed, there will be an opportunity for someone to be the adult in the room, and to remind everyone that they are part of something larger.
Sitting in the same room or attending the same call — both create a fleeting sense of belonging. The good and bad times arising from these encounters fuel after-work gatherings, strengthening trust and cohesion in intangible ways. They may extend existing divides, too, and solidify clans — but even clans evolve.
In other words, as convenient as it is, asynchronous communication at work cannot create these invisible ties that ultimately translate into better business outcomes.
The risk is clear, then. If AI were to push us in an asynchronous direction by summarising threads, drafting decisions, and distributing outcomes, colleagues will never breathe the same air — even digitally.
Consequences are clear, too:
Work morphs into a series of parallel tracks managed by various synthetic platforms.
Organisations will turn into federations of freelancers stitched by algorithms.
Is this form of workplace of the future any desirable?
The rise of machine-first decisions
Uncertainty may be the new certitude, but what is certain is that AI will continue to reshape interactions at work.
As long as AI is not “thinking” autonomously, humans will still have a role to play.
For now, 61% of executives (Accenture, 2024) say they trust AI systems to make operational decisions autonomously. The shift toward “machine-first” governance has begun, but most of these decisions still operate under human ratification.
At this stage, defining the future of work is anyone’s guess, but I can think of three scenarios:
A bleak one:
Work activities have been completely itemised.
The workplace functions as a constellation of individuals feeding a data engine.
AI – from GenAI to advanced robotics – has conquered the world of work with armies of AI workers.
Human workers only ratify – or slightly tweak – AI-powered outcomes.
A linear one:
Work activities further leverage technologies for productivity gains.
The workplace retains most of its current form.
AI and AI workers have taken complete control of transactional work.
Human workers lead emotion-driven work streams, collaborating on innovative products, creative services, and immersive experiences.
A hopeful one:
Work activities are loosely defined, with one strict rallying metric – goals to be attained collectively.
The workplace is a thinking and creative space, reflecting the absence of corporate levels.
AI constantly runs in the background, with duties going from powering key operations to presenting business suggestions using team-specific jargons.
Human workers debate AI-powered outcomes, leaving straightforward choices for AI to decide and focusing on critically thinking about challenging ones.
Yes, Artificial Intelligence is transforming work interactions in ways we can’t fathom yet. This transformation is gradual, maybe insidious, but the fundamental question is where we place the technology in this paradigm shift.
Letting it take centre stage does not mean letting it come to the forefront — and this may be our sweet spot for an AI that elevates humans at work.