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Stop the Meeting Madness

How Voice.AI Improves Company Meeting ROI
 71% of managers said meetings are unproductive and inefficient, 65%
said meetings kept them from actually doing their job, and 64% said
that meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.

THE HUMAN-MADE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS MONSTER

In line with the global cultural shift towards a more inclusive, united and equal society, companies
and organizations are working hard to improve transparency and foster inclusive collaboration across
traditional business hierarchies.

Just as children make one another feel included by inviting each other to play together, executives
turn to the most basic way of enhancing organizational inclusivity and invite more employees to take
part in more meetings and discussions. By attending these meetings, employees can take an active
part in decision making and share their opinions.

Meetings have been recorded as the oldest form of organizational communication with evidence
dating back all the way to Ancient Rome, and the introduction of the first office building with designated
meeting rooms in 1726 – The Old Admiralty Office in London1. So, while company meetings were
always here, the aforementioned trend unintentionally created a ‘meeting monster’ that feeds off
employees’ fear of not being heard, and off their precious time, of course.

STOP THE MEETING MADNESS

From formal, traditional and face-to-face meetings to informal, online and agile sessions, employees
are overwhelmed with endless company meetings and discussions. According to the MIT Sloan
Management Review, executives today spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up
from less than a mere 10 hours in the 1960s2.

While these may help employees feel needed, most people today admit they are struggling to deal
with the number of meetings they attend. This everyday struggle is not only related to the quantity
of meetings, but directly affects their quality. The more meetings in a day, the less time employees
and executives have to truly deepen their discussions and conclusions and carry actual work. Once
meetings start to lose their creative and brainstorming magic, the return on investment on each
meeting immediately declines.

Harvard Business Review noticed this problem and held a survey among 182 senior managers from a
wide range of industries. They found that a staggering 71% of managers said meetings are unproductive
and inefficient, 65% said meetings kept them from actually doing their job, and 64% said that meetings
come at the expense of deep thinking3.

1
Source: The History of Office Design
https://k2space.co.uk/knowledge/history-of-office-design
2
Source: The Science and Fiction of Meetings, MIT Sloan Management Review
https://orgscience.uncc.edu/sites/orgscience.uncc.edu/files/media/Rogelberg%20et%20al.%20-%202007%20-%20The%20science%20and%20fiction%20of%20meetings.pdf
3
Source: Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness

1 Stop the Meeting Madness - How Voice.AI Improves Company Meeting ROI
 To illustrate this issue, Harvard Business Review created the Meeting Cost Calculator that clearly
shows us how time equals money. And a lot of it.

For example, a simple, common scenario where a team of 6 employees meet up for 45 min, can cost
the company 300USD – now let’s go ahead and multiply that by the number of meetings you have per
day. Mind blowing, isn’t it?

FIGURE 1 – Meeting Cost Calculator

As with every investment, looking at the cost of things is irrelevant without taking into consideration
what we get in return. When it comes to meetings, traditional outcomes we expect to get are simple
action items, creative ideas and deadlines. These are usually captured by that one responsible
co-worker who makes sure to take down the meeting minutes and share them post-meeting. But
unfortunately, this does not happen often, creating a problematic ROI for our everyday organizational
meetings.

2 Stop the Meeting Madness - How Voice.AI Improves Company Meeting ROI
 COMPANY MEETINGS BROUGHT TO YOU BY VOICE.AI TECHNOLOGY

An endless number of articles, researches and blog posts have been addressing the problem of
meetings for years - so where’s the ultimate solution we’re all looking for?

Voice-driven and AI technologies are not new to the corporate world and are already being widely
used in conversational bots across various industries. Customer-facing organizations have all made the
natural move to automated conversational bots for customer service and support using Speech-to-text
(STT), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Understanding (NLU) and Generation (NLG) technologies.

Why not take these cutting edge Voice.AI abilities and apply them as a solution to the company
meetings ROI problem? This is exactly what we at AudioCodes had in mind, when we developed
Meeting Insights.

With Meeting Insights, employees can relive meeting content anywhere, anytime using advanced
conversational AI technologies. In-meeting voice assistant, transcription, speaker identification &
tracking and keyword spotting can all be applied to meeting-generated content to make it more
accessible, searchable and most importantly – shareable throughout the organization, making sure
no precious meeting content is missed or overlooked.

The human mind is better at speaking than it is at writing, but it’s

much easier for us to read than it is to listen

RECORDING IS SO 2001

Accessibility and shareability can also be created by merely just recording a meeting, and lucky for
us the recording market is swamped with microphones, headphones and softwares that can make
all your recording dreams come true. But is it enough? Not for the modern organization. Listening
to a meeting recording of 2 hours is even less efficient than ‘wasting your time’ attending the actual
session – and remember how much attending these meetings actually costs?

According to the Linguistic Society of America, the human mind is better at speaking than it is at
writing, but it’s much easier for us to read than it is to listen4. So, while it’s definitely easier for us to talk
in meetings instead of writing up our thoughts, it is also much easier for us to read meeting content,
rather than having to listen to an entire recording of a specific meeting. Meaning a simple audio
recording of our meetings just won’t cut it.

However, recording while applying conversational AI technologies can directly increase team
productivity, enhance collaboration, and spark creativity as it frees attendees’ mind from being
preoccupied with writing down action items and deadlines. It allows meeting participants to simply
talk, while allowing meeting-content-consumers sitting on the other side, to simply read or search for
the most interesting bits.

4
Source: Dr. Kenn Apel (2002)

3 Stop the Meeting Madness - How Voice.AI Improves Company Meeting ROI
 THE NEW ROI

Untapping spoken conversations using conversational AI technologies is key to upgrading the ROI we
get from organizational meetings, especially the actual return on employee’s precious time. A whole
new world of meeting outcomes can be discovered once the entire meeting is recorded, transcribed
and analyzed using Voice.AI technologies.

AudioCodes Meeting Insights was created with this new ROI vision in mind, so you will never have to
rely on that one responsible person to take down your meeting minutes.

Together with Mia your in-meeting voice assistant, you can use your voice to create action items,
notes, decisions and quick meeting summaries, search for that one thing your boss said using speaker
identification and get notified every time someone mentions your account using tags and our built-in
transcription capabilities – making sure you always stay on top of everything that is relevant specifically
for you.

The AudioCodes team is happy to take you on a meeting transforming journey and to upgrade your
organizational meetings experience.

About AudioCodes
AudioCodes Ltd. (NASDAQ, TASE: AUDC) is a leading vendor of advanced communications software, products and productivity solutions
for the digital workplace. AudioCodes enables enterprises and service providers to build and operate all-IP voice networks for unified
communications, contact centers, and hosted business services. AudioCodes offers a broad range of innovative products, solutions and
services that are used by large multi-national enterprises and leading tier-1 operators around the world.​

International Headquarters AudioCodes Inc. Contact us: www.audiocodes.com/contact

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2020 V.1

4 Stop the Meeting Madness - How Voice.AI Improves Company Meeting ROI