An HBR article titled, “stop the meeting madness” noted, the length and frequency of meetings has increased, and executives can spend up to 23 hours a week in meetings. For most executives, 23 hours is way too much time, particularly if they feel that they cannot quantify or quality the benefit of the meetings they attend. The question then is, how can you stop the culture of inefficient meetings and introduce a culture of efficient web conferencing?

Unless you have heard of Aira, an AI meeting tool, knowing what an efficient meeting means or even where to begin with creating one, can be quite a daunting task. But fear not, for we will show you in this article by demonstrating:

• What an inefficient meeting looks like. This is a “before” scenario, where you haven’t automated web conferencing
• What an efficient meeting looks like. This is an “after” scenario, where web conferencing in your company will be conducted via Aira

Before Scenario: Web conferencing Without an AI meeting Assistant

Picture this: Your boss has just told you that he needs to have a meeting with the sales team. You immediately set about organizing the meeting in as little time as possible, although you already know from past experience that the task is more complex than it looks.

Here’s what you have to grapple with:

1. Getting A Meeting Time That Is Suitable For Everyone

Meeting turnout is the most important goal on your mind. As salespeople are busy, field-based professionals, they most likely will not be around the office on the same day. More so, your boss is a busy person. As such, your biggest task is coordinating with every individual member of the sales team to ensure that their available times coincide with your boss’s.

The Challenges

• Manually coordinating meeting time is tedious, repetitive and time consuming
• Even after all that coordination, you might still get low turnout
• If anyone misses a meeting, they will only have manually-typed minutes to rely on. They will not learn of any important details not captured in the minutes.

2. Taking Minutes

If every member doesn’t attend, you will need to organize a follow up meeting with them and your boss. This means spending more time organizing meetings, at the expense of your other responsibilities.

The Challenges

• If people speak over each other, you are likely to miss what they say. Unless you want to send inaccurate meeting notes and action items, you have to clarify with people, edit, then send out the minutes
• Lack of standardization of language, terminology and format. If you are not a salesperson, you will need to work a little bit harder to learn the jargon, in order to properly capture the spirit of the discussion notes. In addition, manual minute formats change. This is a seemingly unimportant factor, but one that if not observed can lower team standards.
• Once filed, meeting minutes are likely to be forgotten. Unless you come up with a way of archiving your minutes and naming them properly, they will be difficult to find.
• It can be difficult to find a specific discussion item in meeting minutes
• Wastage of resources. Writing notes only to type them later results in wastage of paper. You waste even more paper if everyone has to print their meeting notes thereafter.

The After: Enter Aira, The AI Meeting Assistant

As mentioned above, AI has pervaded many areas of life, including meetings. Companies that are keen on staying ahead of the curve are now using AI web conferencing tools like Aira to save precious minutes.

Assuming you have an AI meeting assistant, here’s how you would go about arranging web conferencing for your team:

1. Take The Hustle Off Organizing Meetings

An AI meeting assistant can make it easier to find a suitable meeting time. For example, every member of the team logs into the meeting assistant, their calendars automatically sync, giving you visibility of their available times. This way, you don’t have to coordinate meeting attendance time with individual members.

Further, advanced features such as Aira’s ability to attend meetings on behalf of people mean that even if someone misses a meeting, they can always catch up later without any involvement from you.

2. No Need For Manual Minute Taking

You don’t need to worry about taking minutes or meeting notes when you have an AI meeting assistant. The app will record the minutes and notes and also provides transcripts of the same. Since AI learns, it can detect human language with precision, meaning that everything said in a meeting is recorded. This limits the need for backchecking with individuals or editing.

3. Action Items

Another thing that an AI web conferencing assistant like Aira can do is managing meeting related tasks. Anyone can go into the tool, access transcripts or recordings to find what they need to do.

4. Searchability

Keywords tell people if content is relevant to them. AI makes this possible. For instance, Aira’s use of keywords makes it easy to search through meeting notes. This way, any participant who did not attend a meeting can search through a transcript by keyword to learn if the meeting was relevant to them.

Conclusion

We hope it’s now clear that by using an AI meeting assistant you can get these key benefits:

• You can save a lot of time by eliminating manual meeting tasks
• You can get more value from web conferencing, e.g, through accurate notes and minutes

If you are still conducting your meetings manually, sign up for a demo with Aira to experience the real value of AI in web conferencing.