Rebecca Hinds has studied office meetings and collaboration efforts for more than 15 years and most recently she’s seen how AI can make corporate get-togethers better — or worsen existing problems.

In a study commissioned by Read.AI, Hinds found that AI, when correctly implemented, can encourage more participation by women and lower-level employees. At the same time, it can actually hurt hybrid meetings, with in-room participants speaking up much more than remote attendees. AI could make meetings much worse.

Hinds’ book, “Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done,” was released this month. She sat down recently with Computerworld to explain how AI is changing meetings, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. 

Why are meetings still such a central problem for organizations? “Meetings are the tip of the iceberg for organizational health. Despite new technology, what happened during the pandemic, and us now working in fundamentally new ways, meetings have remained largely unchanged.

“We know from decades of research that meetings are often sites for very detrimental status dynamics. Often, senior folks or the highest-paid person in the room will influence the outcome before the meeting even started.

“Meetings… emain stagnant while the rest of the workplace evolves.”

What’s your main takeaway about how AI is affecting corporate meetings today? “The technology is amplifying whatever already exists in your culture. If you’ve developed a culture where meetings are strictly information exchange, AI will enable more information broadcasting to workers. The problem isn’t information — it’s the discovery of relevant information.

“Meetings should serve a very specific purpose, a specific decision to be made or a specific debate. And the more we can understand the purpose, the more we can then surface the right information.

“They should not be used for information exchange. That can and should happen asynchronously.”

Which meetings are actually useful? “Useful meetings have three characteristics: the work is complex, emotionally intense, or very risky. Those deserve face-to-face interaction, because it’s about empathy, trust, and body language. When you’re trying to communicate hard change, that requires a live meeting. When there’s enough ambiguity that warrants rapid back-and-forth exchange, that’s collaboration that needs to be real-time and spontaneous.

“If the workflow is predictable and people just need to do their piece of the puzzle, you don’t need a meeting. You need clear process documentation and maybe asynchronous updates.”

How are senior leaders using AI to tackle meetings, and what’s the impact? “Leaders are under massive pressure to flatten organizational charts, which creates ballooning spans of control. Because of this pressure, they’re trying to outsource everything they should be doing as managers to AI.

“Meetings become one of those mechanisms. They’re using AI to send summaries instead of attending meetings themselves, which fundamentally undermines the purpose of collaboration. You can’t build trust through a summary. You can’t demonstrate vulnerability or create psychological safety through automated notes.”

How can AI help companies reduce unnecessary coordination meetings? “AI has enormous potential if we’re able to truly map the process first and then automate parts of it. In theory, we should be having fewer meetings aimed at coordination and more meetings aimed at collaboration.

The problem historically has been we don’t have clarity about the process, we don’t document it, and we certainly don’t automate it. Meetings often become a safeguard to make sure the process is working, when really it should by default.”

In an AI-driven world, what’s the value of meetings as simple human connection, like going for a beer and discussing ideas? “It’s huge. Human-to-human connection, manager-to-employee connection, has been declining for years. Loneliness, the proportion of employees who have a best friend at work, all these metrics have been declining.

“If we design meetings right, they should be a primary place for that human connection. There’s nothing a manager can do that’s more impactful on a consistent basis than that consistent weekly one-on-one check-in, even for 15 minutes. The purpose of becoming more data-driven and efficient in our meeting design is to free up time for the meetings and collaboration that shouldn’t be highly efficient.

“If you’re in a creative session aimed at sparking creativity and innovation or boosting team morale or team bonds, that should not be a highly efficient pursuit. We should be anchoring on human-to-human connection. In the best cases, AI enables us to be more human in our interactions and in our meetings.”

How should organizations use data to improve their meetings rather than just adding more metrics? “First, understand what the data is for. We need metrics that give people a good sense of how the meeting is going and whether it’s likely to lead to an effective outcome. We don’t want too many metrics. We want the right metrics that allow us to understand our own participation.

AI should be intelligent enough to understand the meeting’s purpose and surface relevant information that helps the meeting move forward. Much of this should happen outside the meeting because the more information you dump on people during the meeting, the less they’re able to engage human to human.”

Beyond tracking who talks the most, what meeting dynamics should organizations measure? “Meetings are sites for status dynamics that can be very detrimental to outcomes. Senior folks speaking first, senior folks speaking more, senior folks influencing the room — these patterns undermine effective collaboration.

“New metrics around charisma and inclusive language can surface insights we often have no way of understanding, even at a gut level. This allows us to redesign both meetings and our own participation to be more effective.”

What’s the risk of replacing human participation in meetings with AI-generated summaries? “The more we automate the human elements of collaboration, the more we lose the very things that make meetings valuable: spontaneity, creativity, vulnerability, and trust-building. You cannot automate your way to better collaboration.

“The goal should be using AI to eliminate unnecessary meetings so the meetings you do have can be more deeply human.”