It can be difficult for workers to find time to dedicate to their actual job duties when their calendars are filled with endless meetings, many of which have dubious value.
According to some estimates, the average employee attends 62 meetings per month, and meetings take up roughly 15 percent of an organization’s collective time. In a world where time is money, that’s a lot of money to spend on meetings that are often seen as unproductive.
While it might sound ironic at first glance, the CEO of Zoom—a company whose business is centered on meetings—wants to change that, but probably not in the way one might think.
“Eric Yuan and his team at the cloud-based video conferencing platform are working on ‘digital-twin technology,’ which would allow workers to clone themselves and have those avatars attend meetings and other time-consuming aspects of work life,” writes Anna Lazarus Caplan in an article for People.”
The concept would work by creating a digital avatar of the employee who would attend meetings on behalf of the actual employee, freeing that employee up to focus on more productive work, or even to focus on personal, leisure activities, thereby improving work-life balance.
“I can send a digital version of myself to join so I can go to the beach,” Yuan, 54, told The Verge.
While this is an exciting notion, Yuan acknowledges that the technology to make it happen doesn’t exist quite yet, and advances in AI would be needed to turn his vision into a reality.
It’s also an open question how well AI could truly replace humans in meetings.
After all, the whole point of a meeting should be to get to a common understanding of key issues and the path to resolution of those issues through closer human interaction (instead of trading endless emails, for example). How comfortable would humans be taking a backseat and letting AI make those decisions for them? What would that mean for job security long-term?
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