Comment by AlexandrB
1 day ago
The catch is: does anyone actually read this stuff? I've been taking meeting notes for meetings I run (without AI) for around 6 months now and I suspect no one other than myself has looked at the notes I've put together. I've only looked back at those notes once or twice.
A big part of the problem is even finding this content in a modern corporate intranet (i.e. Confluence) and having a bunch of AI-generated text in there as well isn't going to help.
When I was a founding engineer at a(n ill-fated) startup, we used an AI product to transcribe and summarize enterprise sales calls. As a dev it was usually a waste of my time to attend most sales meetings, but it was highly illustrative to read the summaries after the fact. In fact many, many of the features we built were based on these action items.
If you're at the scale where you have corporate intranet, like Confluence, then yeah AI note summarizing will feel redundant because you probably have the headcount to transcribe important meetings (e.g. you have a large enough enterprise sales staff that part of their job description is to transcribe notes from meetings rather than a small staff stretched thin because you're on vanishing runway at a small startup.) Then the natural next question arises: do you really need that headcount?
I thought the point of having a meeting-notes person was so that at least one person would pay attention to details during the meeting.
I thought it was so I could go back 1 year and say, 'I was against this from the beginning and I was quite vocal that if you do this, the result will be the exact mess you're asking me to clean up now.'
Ah, but a record for CYA and “told you so”, that’s pure cynicism. “At least one person paying attention” at least we can pretend the intent was to pair some potential usefulness with our cynicism.
Also, ensure that if the final decition was to paint the the bike shed green, everyone agree it was the final decitions. (In long discusions, sometimes people misunderstand which was the final decition.)
If they misunderstood they will still disagree so the meeting notes will trigger another mail chain and, you guessed right, another meeting.
What is the problem?
Notes are valuable for several reasons.
I sometimes take notes myself just to keep myself from falling asleep in an otherwise boring meeting where I might need to know something shared (but probably not). It doesn't matter if nobody reads these as the purpose wasn't to be read.
I have often wished for notes from some past meeting because I know we had good reasons for our decisions but now when questioned I cannot remember them. Most meetings this doesn't happen, but if there were automatic notes that were easy to search years latter that would be good.
Of course at this point I must remind you that the above may be bad. If there is a record of meeting notes then courts can subpoena them. This means meetings with notes have to be at a higher level were people are not comfortably sharing what every it is they are thinking of - even if a bad idea is rejected the courts still see you as a jerk for coming up with the bad idea.
Accurate notes are valuable for several reasons.
Show me an LLM that can reliably produce 100% accurate notes. Alternatively, accept working in a company where some nonsense becomes future reference and subpoenable documentation.
Counterpoint: show me a human who can reliably produce 100% accurate notes.
Seriously, I wish to hire this person.
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If it is just for people in the meeting we don't need 100%, just close enough that we remember what was discussed.
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Meh, show me a human that can reliably produce 100% accurate notes. It seems that the baseline for AI should be human performance rather than perfection. There are very few perfect systems in existence, and humans definitely aren't one of them.
You show me human meeting minutes written by a PM that accurately reflect the engineer discussions first.
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I agree, and my vision of this is that instead of notes, the meeting minutes would be catalogued into a vector store, indexed by all relevant metadata. And then instead of pre-generated notes, you'll get what you want on the fly, with the LLM being the equivalent of chatting with that coworker who's been working there forever and has context on everything.
You can probably buy another neural net SAAS subscription to summarize the summaries for you :)