Good Idea or Bad Idea? AI in meetings

In My Humble Opinion
1

Here’s the issue. I frequently have grant committee meetings where I’m so busy writing stuff down, I’m not really aware of what was said. Also due to executive functioning issues I can forget stuff. So I’ve had to piece it together from my hasty notes afterward. Also I may have trouble trying to remember whether we discussed something specific.

An example of this would be if I asked for a list of community partners we could reach out to for letters of support. People will bombard me with information while I try to write it all down, then after the meeting I’ve got a list of six partners when I’m thinking more like twelve were mentioned.

I recently found a potential solution to this, called Pocket. It seems like it’s just a basic recorder with AI note-taking features. You turn it on, you record, it gives you a written version and summary of your meeting.

I don’t anticipate anyone would mind me using this, we record Teams meetings quite often.

I am concerned about a couple things:

  1. Confidentiality. Not that anything is super top secret in these meetings, but we do discuss strategic planning and mention employees by name when we’re talking about various funding opportunities. I don’t really trust AI to be confidential in general. What I’m most concerned about is whether or not the federal government could subpoena my meeting notes to then use against us in some BS way. If that sounds crazy paranoid then you’re probably not aware of how bad things have gotten for nonprofits under the current Trump administration. Recipients of federal awards are under very close surveillance right now and have been threatened with prosecution for doing liberal things the government doesn’t like. It’s extremely dystopian.
  2. I just generally don’t like AI. I use Claude at work but I feel like this is just more AI creep into every facet of life. I don’t know if I should be encouraging this sort of thing. I’m sure all this data will be sold to someone and I just don’t like it.

There was a third thing I can’t remember.

Anyway, I’m not sure what is really the alternative? Obviously a simple recorder would work, but I’d have to summarize it all myself, and realistically I probably won’t have time to listen to it all a second time and try to fill in the gaps. But if it’s easy to navigate I might be able to find specific parts of the recording. Does anything like this exist that is not extremely shady?

Any other ideas? Must I just carry on with incomplete information?

Thanks.

2

It’s become very common in medical situations to have AI take notes. Then the doctor has to correct mistakes and flesh things out a bit, but i gather it’s much faster than taking notes directly. (Although i did once see a doctor who was a very good typist and wore his notes in real time.)

Maybe look into what they do for confidentiality?

3

I teach proprietary classes, both virtual and in-person, and we have had to be much more specific about prohibiting both recording (audio or video) AND the use of AI note-taking applications. We’ve had people come back after classes and ask us questions that were obviously based on a weird interpretation of the lecture portion. We strongly believe the problem was AI-related. (We also notice people using AI note-taking in virtual classes, especially since the apps notify the class presenter that it is being used.)

4

Do you have an approved AI at work that’s secure? If so, just digitally record the meeting, upload your sound file to that AI, and have it summarize or whatever you want to do.

5

FWIW, I’m an officer in a guild in World of Warcraft, and we use an AI to take notes and summarize our meetings (conducted over Discord) and it does an absolutely stellar job. This is one of those situations where I would be willing to welcome our AI overlords.