The disturbing new ubiquity of AI note takers
Because data is like toothpaste; hard to put back in the tube after collection
Cast your mind back to the before times, maybe 2020, 2021. The world was in the grip of the Covid pandemic, those who could worked from home when they could and for many it felt like we spent half our waking lives on video calls.
Occasionally those calls were recorded - maybe an all hands team call for a globally distributed team where you just couldn’t find a time zone friendly slot for all involved. We would carefully check that all involved understood that the call was being recorded, the software itself popped up reminders, often an audible tone and a spoken warning as well.
Fast forward to today, I regularly find myself in calls with not one but several AI notetakers. I can’t remember the last time someone asked if it was OK if their notetaker joined the call or if everyone on the call was fine with their voice and words being recorded, transcribed and summarised.
Transcripts are pretty good, summaries leave a lot of room for improvement
While I haven’t used a AI notetaker myself, I’ve read the summaries from a few (as an aside, I do wonder if this unprompted sharing of the summary is a canny tactic to reduce pushback during adoption) and I remain unimpressed.
As anyone who has tried to produce comprehensive, accurate, readable summary notes of a multi topic, multi speaker conversation will know, it is not easy to do, so I’m not casting shade on the AI notetaker efforts. But they don’t get a pass mark yet, let alone a high grade.
The transcription by and large is pretty good (except for ongoing challenges with industry jargon and three letter acronyms). Presumably this is helped a lot by the nature of online meetings where there is usually an individual mic for each participant giving clear speaker seperation.
Where does the data end up?
I’ve never been in a meeting where the terms and conditions of the given notetaking software is shared with the meeting participants. Sure, this would be extremely cumbersome and I get that it, if forced, it could rapidly become a box ticking exercise akin to the ‘reject cookies’ choices that pop up on many AU websites. But it irritates me that this means we slide unthinkingly and unasked towards the low friction path of data being hoovered up.
Imagine if one of the more popular tools is recording the audio so they can take a little extra time after the call to produce a high quality summary. They hang onto that data because, well, they can. Or frankly, because someone in the company forgets to auto delete it, which is much more common than you might think. They get hacked. Now all that voice data is on the dark web. Deepfake paradise.
Switched on by default
This personal bugbear of mine suddenly got a lot of press in Australia this week when the New South Wales education department realised that the video conferencing feature in the Microsoft Teams platform had been recording student biometrics (face and voice) since it was switched on by default in March.
The feature was switched off in April and the profiles were deleted within 24 hours of the department becoming aware that voice and facial enrolment was enabled.
The Guardian, 20/5/2025
In the Guardian article, a quote from Rys Farthing, the director of policy and research at the research organisation Reset Tech Australia, sums up the tone of my uneasiness about AI notetakers perfectly.
Was this data used to train their AI after it was collected? Are we sure it wasn’t disclosed or shared while it existed, and that all copies of it have been deleted? Data is like toothpaste, it’s hard to put it back in the tube once it’s been collected.
Minutes that really matter
Call it attention bias, but the notetaker references just kept on coming this week with the Australian Institute of Company Directors releasing new guidance on the use of AI notetakers and adjacent technologies in board meetings.
While AI may improve efficiency, it should never replace the critical role of human oversight. Boards, governance professionals and management must have appropriate controls in place to preserve the integrity and accuracy value of board minutes.
AICD statement on Effective board minutes and the use of AI, May 2025
As a non executive director, albeit of a sizeable not-for-profit not an ASX listed business, I am acutely aware of how pivotal the contents of board meeting minutes can become in the event of a crisis. So the AICD advice isn’t surprising. Where do you draw the line though?
I’ve had many busy execs tell me they think meeting summaries are great because they can catch up on what happened in meetings they miss. If you’re just talking about a general vibe check, that might work well for you. But I’m personally uncomfortable with the idea of relying on them for anything substantive at this point in time.
In short
As is typically the case these days, it isn’t the technology that is presenting the real concern here, at least not for me. It’s the human choices.
For the deliberate users - which I’m sure include many of my readers, please be mindful of the inaccuracies, both obvious and subtle, in the meeting summaries you are relying on. And please think carefully about which meetings you invite AI into, and how you proactively facilitate others to ‘eject the bot’. Be really sure you understand the impact of power dynamics here too - if you’re the highest paid person in the room, does ‘yes I’m OK with your AI notetaker’ really hold any weight?
For the other meeting attendees - the audio recording of your voice and potentially your image, are being captured and may be being stored. Your views will be represented, potentially inaccurately in the generated summary. That might be fine, or it might not. But be informed and if you’re not OK with it in a given context, be confident that you’re not the only one and that asking someone politely to remove their AI notetaker is perfectly reasonable.
For the app developers - I’m not a hater, I do see the great potential of these applications, particularly for folks who find meeting participation or attendance challenging. It would go a great way to restoring my confidence in your software if you would
(a) make it easy for users to choose which meetings to use a note taker in. When you opt it in by default to every meeting, make that hard or impossible to change, or offer the option to have it operate in stealth mode so that other participants don’t realise it is there, you make me very suspicious as to your actual motives. Yes, audio and image data is like liquid gold. No it is not OK to take it without informed consent and it is definitely not OK to use it in any other way.
(b) find a clear and succinct way to summarise how the data captured in the meeting is used, where it is stored and when it is deleted. Yes I know that’s tricky UX to do well but you build complex software so I have every faith in your ability on this challenge too.