Can we make work meetings more bearable?

Husayn Kassai is the founder of London-based start-up Quench AI, which makes AI-powered training software.

He predicts that in the future “everyone in the workforce will have some sort of AI coach accompanying them” to meetings.

“Meetings are going to be a lot more productive, because we will be going into them much better informed, and able to make useful and more valuable judgements,” says Mr Kassai.

He adds that workers will use AI “to help get them clued up and give them a breakdown of the information”.

As a result, he says meetings will start to accomplish things, unlike now, because “people aren’t talking about stuff that matters because they are not prepared”.

Mr Kassai also envisages AI acting as a kind of moderator, offering feedback after the meeting, perhaps even pointing out the things the humans in the room feel unable to.

“When you have an idiot in the meeting room who goes off on a rant, and someone who doesn’t say much… the AI could say things like ‘speaker three, you only spoke 2% of the time and next time you need to speak 20% of the time’.”