CEO Brad Jacobs uses AI to automatically take notes and generate summaries from important meetings across his company. This technology provides him with near-instantaneous, unfiltered insights into operations and challenges that previously would have taken months to surface through the corporate hierarchy.

Cognitively offloading and sending an AI agent to a meeting instead of attending personally is becoming a new workplace faux pas. This behavior signals to other participants that you don't value their time or the meeting's purpose, and suggests the meeting was unnecessary to begin with.

Use AI tools like meeting recorders to handle the administrative burden of relationship management. By automating note-taking and detail extraction, you offload cognitive capacity, allowing you to be more present, listen actively, and focus on the uniquely human aspects of a conversation.

By the end of 2026, recording every meeting and applying AI agents to transcribe, summarize, assign action items, and align with strategy will be table stakes. Hoffman argues that companies not doing this will be making excuses, akin to sticking with horse-drawn carriages in the age of the car.

Tools like Granola automate rote tasks, freeing up mental bandwidth during meetings. This allows participants to focus entirely on interpersonal dynamics and building rapport. The real benefit is fostering genuine human connection, which is crucial for high-stakes deals and collaborations.

Establish a clear rule for AI call summaries. If a manager was present in the meeting, a summary is a sufficient tool to refresh their memory. However, if they were not present, they must listen to the full recording to grasp the critical context and nuance that AI summaries inevitably miss.

The proliferation of AI note-takers in every meeting and the integration of unrelated features, like Slack within Zoom, is causing user burnout and a sense of being constantly watched or overwhelmed by feature bloat.

Hoffman argues companies should immediately start recording all meetings and applying AI for summaries and action items. He sees this as a low-hanging fruit for productivity and predicts that within years, not having an AI in your meeting will be considered strange and inefficient.

Instead of relying on subjective 360 reviews, which can be compromised by a lack of psychological safety, leaders can use AI to analyze transcripts from their meetings. The AI provides objective, data-driven feedback on communication patterns (e.g., over-talking, asking curious questions) to identify blind spots.