'I think AI has the ability to provide productivity gains right across your business day,' expert says, warning of 'AI divide' if tools given only to senior employees
More than four in 10 business leaders in Australia believe that their time is overspent on meetings, according to a recent report from Zoom.
The report, which surveyed 750 Australian business leaders, found that nearly half feel that they are spending too much time on in-person (44%) and virtual (45%) meetings.
More than half of leaders (56%) also believe that they could be more productive if they dedicated their meeting time to other tasks instead.
Bede Hackney, Head of ANZ Zoom, attributed this fatigue to the accelerating rate of change across organisations, where employers are aiming for increased productivity despite not having more people and resources.
"By definition, we're all busy. And layer on top of that, we're all change fatigued," Hackney told HRD. "We're all trying to drive agendas of change and transformation and we're trying to do that with fewer people. And at the same time, our people are less open to change because they're fatigued."
Hackney believes that this ongoing fatigue from meetings will make business leaders more inclined to try out new tools — with AI being a viable option.
"I think AI has the ability to provide productivity gains right across your business day," he said.
The ANZ Zoom head said business leaders can leverage AI to bring back the time business leaders spend on meetings. One AI capability that he noted is extremely helpful is its ability to generate a summary for meetings.
"I'll tell you as a leader myself, that ability to get a meeting summary has changed the way I think about whether I'm going to attend a meeting or not," he said.
"I can read the summary, I can query the meeting. I can do things like ask if my name was mentioned. If there's a really interesting topic, I can go back and watch that section of the meeting."
So instead of spending an entire hour with just half of his attention on meetings, Hackney said AI allows him to spend minutes in them.
"If, like me, you're in more than two hours of meetings per day, then we think AI tools can give you six or six-and-a-half hours of benefit back over the course of a week," he said.
"So when you extrapolate that out over the entirety of your workforce, we think you can reclaim a big chunk of that time, which is a massive opportunity."
But given widespread privacy and security concerns across the world surrounding AI, not every business leader might be open to the idea of letting the technology join their meetings and take notes.
While Hackney noted that their findings indicate that Australian leaders are "really optimistic" about the outcomes of leveraging AI, he told employers who remain hesitant to practice caution when choosing their AI partner.
"My advice to organisations would be to be really careful about how you select your AI partners," he said.
He warned that if organisations don't provide access to AI tools, then human ingenuity will let employees simply get around that barrier.
"I think providing access to those AI tools, in a governed and considered way, will help you take control of that and then, and then just finally… when you select your vendors, think long and hard about where your data is going."
Hackney also warned against creating a divide in the workplace, a situation that can emerge in large companies with thousands of employees that implement AI.
With the cost of deploying AI tools at work, he indicated employers are likely going to be selective about who will receive access to AI tools.
"I personally believe that there's this risk that we're going to start creating an AI divide, where you've got the ‘AI haves’ who are in senior roles that companies want to spend $50 per month to support. And then there's others who are in maybe more junior roles who don't get that investment.
"It creates this situation where those individual contributors who don't have access to the tools aren't as productive. They're also not becoming fluent at using AI tools and so you create this divide."
In integrating AI at work, Hackney ultimately advised employers to seek "quick wins."
"There's a lot of organisations that approach digital transformation as a multi-year project with deliverables all the way at the back end of the project," he said. "As companies look at how we get benefits out of AI, I would look for the quick wins."
According to Hackney, quick wins build momentum.
"There's nothing like that's going to accelerate your transformation agenda, for example, like getting quick wins with the first project, which gives you momentum to bite into the second and the third project."
To achieve these quick wins from AI, Hackney reiterated the importance of having the right AI partner.
"Getting those quick wins is about having AI tools that are accurate, right?" he said. "And so, when you're picking your tools, accuracy counts because without that accurate foundation, then of course you're not going to deliver the results they're looking for."
