“I love meetings!” – said no one, ever
Meetings are an unfortunate, but critical, business function for knowledge workers everywhere. They can be unfortunate because they have the potential to waste a lot of time. We’ve all thought, heard, or said many of the common meeting chorus refrains: “Can you hear me?” “Do you see my screen now?” “This meeting could have just been an email.”
The shift to hybrid work accelerated the use and utility of video conferencing while creating a lot of efficiencies by enabling more people to work from anywhere. But it didn’t necessarily accelerate the productivity and value of meetings. Tech problems, distracted participants, or even just poor organization can still offset the intended ROI of gathering team members together to solve problems and disseminate information.
All of this is changing. The Hollywood movie punchline “We‘ve got to stop meeting like this” is taking on new meaning. The growing introduction of AI applications and features is making the meetings we participate in better, and even improving the meetings we don’t attend.
Microsoft Teams with Copilot embraces AI to create a more productive and collaborative environment for meetings. Lenovo’s ThinkSmart portfolio of smart collaboration solutions certified for Teams offers integrated, flexible, and secure solutions for the platform. As the potential of generative AI (Gen AI) becomes unlocked, Teams is at the forefront of modern workplace communication.
Hybrid meetings—where some participants are in-room and others remote—can be challenging. It can be difficult for remote participants to see and understand who is speaking in a room. To address this, Microsoft introduced IntelliFrame to Microsoft Teams Rooms. Using Cloud AI, IntelliFrame identifies and captures individual video feeds of in-room participants, making it easier for remote attendees to see who is speaking. Teams Rooms devices now have IntelliFrame enabled by default, ensuring seamless hybrid meeting experiences.
Microsoft Teams continues to enhance call quality. Echo cancellation, improved audio in poor acoustic environments, and simultaneous speaking and listening without interruptions are some of the recent AI-powered features. Additionally, video and screen sharing quality optimizations provide clearer visuals during meetings.
Microsoft also recently introduced enhancements to Copilot in Teams meetings. Now, Copilot not only provides meeting transcripts but also extracts valuable information from the meeting chat. Whether it’s spoken content in transcripts or written messages in chat, Copilot helps ensure workers have a holistic view of what transpired during the meeting. This feature streamlines collaboration and helps participants stay informed.
Teams Premium users also benefit from access to intelligent call recaps. After recorded Teams calls, an intelligent recap containing AI-generated meeting notes and action items is produced. This feature can help ensure that important details from calls are captured to help users stay organized. Copilot license holders will also have access to automatically generated intelligent call recaps.
These changes to how we work and collaborate with the assistance of AI are just the tip of the iceberg. In the years to come, not only will hybrid meetings become an even more seamless business activity, but the value that can be derived and executed on will also increase. Meeting participants can have clear action items automatically generated for them afterwards, and AI assistants will support finding and organization information on AI PCs so those action items can be completed faster and better.
The AI revolution in business and its impact on corporations meeting cultures couldn’t be happening at a better time. According to Harvard Business Review, meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, and executives now spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.
With conference calls and then video conferencing, technology has enabled more meetings and greater connectivity while enterprises grew globally. Now technology is not just making more meetings possible, it’s making them better. And it’s enabling workers to make smarter decisions about attending meetings. Got a schedule conflict or just too busy with other pressing tasks? No problem. Meetings are now recorded, or you can quickly read high-quality auto-generated transcripts.
Working closely with our partners, Lenovo will continue to deliver on its promise of smarter technology for all and make meetings better for our customers by delivering the hardware and computing power to get the most out of cutting-edge AI applications.
