What workplace AI is secretly recording in your meetings

The Australian

3 days ago

Tiffany N. Lewis was worried she was being duped. A potential client had reached out about working with her digital marketing agency on a pro-bono basis, but his message went straight to spam. Then he blew off several scheduled meetings with Lewis. Was he a fraud?
When the client asked her to meet again, Lewis added him to a call she was already on with her assistant. Before he joined, Lewis joked: 'Is he, like, a Nigerian prince?'
Despite the scammy red flags, he turned out to be a legitimate person. Lewis was relieved – until she realised her new client had received a full summary of the call in his inbox, including her 'Nigerian prince' remark. She was running an AI notetaker the whole time.
'I was very lucky that the person I was working with had a good sense of humour,' said Lewis, who lives in Stow, Ohio.
AI is listening in on your work meetings – including the parts you don't want anyone to hear. Before attendees file in, or when one colleague asks another to hang back to discuss a separate matter, AI notetakers may pick up on the small talk and private discussions meant for a select audience, then blast direct quotes to everyone in the meeting.
Nicole and Tim Delger run a Nashville branding firm called Studio Delger. After one business meeting late last year, the couple received a summary from Zoom's AI assistant that was decidedly not work-related.
'Studio discussed the possibility of getting sandwich ingredients from Publix,' one bullet point said. Another key takeaway: 'Don't like soup.' Their client never showed up to the meeting, and the studio had spent the time talking about what to make for lunch.
'That was the first time it had caught a private conversation,' Nicole said. Fortunately the summary didn't go to the client.
Andrea Serra, an account-strategy co-ordinator at a communications agency, has experienced this first-hand. In one transcript, an AI notetaker caught her describing her frustration with the new Whole Foods store in her neighbourhood; though she'd set her preferences so that notes go to the host only, she shared the email with two other people on the call for laughs. Another meeting recap featured bullets of her discussing almost burning down her kitchen while trying to make a new sweet potato recipe.
'It'll be like all of our action steps, all the strategy we discussed during the meeting, and then randomly in there, something about our personal lives that we had talked about last week and wanted to catch up on this week as well,' Serra said. 'Just one little sentence as a surprise in there.'
Though her boss, Debora Lima, had hoped the AI summaries would reduce work for the team, she's still waiting for the technology to improve. Meanwhile, she and her colleagues have embraced them as comic relief. As she was looking over notes from a meeting she recently hosted, she noticed the phrase 'hey cutie pie' in the transcript. Lima said there should be a company-wide Slack channel to archive the funniest examples.
Notetakers can do a variety of tasks, from recording and transcribing calls, generating action items for teams and recapping what's already been said to anyone joining late. Many signal to attendees that a meeting is being recorded and transcribed.
Zoom's AI Companion, which generated more than 7.2 million meeting summaries by the end of January 2024, flashes a dialogue box at the top of the screen to let participants know when it's turned on. As long as it's active, an AI Companion diamond icon continues to flash in the top right corner of the meeting. People can also ask the host to stop using the AI Companion.
'We want users to feel they're really in control,' said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom.
Google's AI notetaker functions similarly, where only meeting hosts or employees of the host organisation have the ability to turn it on or off. When it's on, people will see a notification and hear an audio cue, and a blue pencil icon will appear in the top right corner.
'We put a lot of care into making sure meeting participants know exactly if and when AI tools in Meet are being used,' said Awaneesh Verma, senior director of product management and real time communications at Google Workspace.
The automatic summaries can be informative and timesaving, or unintentionally hilarious.
Kelsey Ogletree, chief executive of a tech platform for media professionals, received a Zoom AI summary, titled 'Monty's Messy Morning', describing how her dog, Monty, ate leftover food on the counter and threw up in the house. It went on to say that 'Kelsey was disgusted by the incident and considered washing Monty's head with Dawn dish soap.' It was a conversation between her and her husband, who's also her business partner. (And Monty is a cat, not a dog.) John Barentine, an astronomer and consultant in Tucson, Arizona, doesn't use AI notetakers but has been on plenty of calls with them. He was most recently surprised by the AI summary of one call that was sent to him, summarising the small talk at the beginning of the call. It said: 'John Barentine humorously notes that there is a lethal dose of water for humans.' Mr Barentine said he was discussing the devastating Texas floods with a client; the AI had completely misunderstood the context.
He says he's now more likely to use the private chat feature in meetings instead of saying something aloud while AI is listening.
'At least I know that if I make a remark to somebody privately for now, that's not being swept up by the AI notetaker,' he said.
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