In the spring one of our account managers signed up for an AI note taking service with her work account. It connected to her calendar, joined her online meetings as an extra participant, recorded them and sent a written summary afterwards. She found it genuinely useful, and nobody in IT knew it existed.
In May she held a call with a large customer about the renewal of a three year contract. When the customer's buyers left the call, she and our sales director stayed on for ten minutes to talk about where we would settle: the lowest price we would accept, and the services we were willing to give away to keep the account. The note taker was still in the meeting. When the meeting ended, it emailed its summary to every person on the calendar invitation, as its default setting said it should. That included three people at the customer.
Their head of procurement replied the next morning to thank us for the notes. The renewal closed at our floor price.
Nobody had broken in and nothing had been stolen. The tool did what its settings described. What none of us had thought about was that it acted for her in places she could not see: in meetings after people had left, in meetings she had declined, and in the inboxes of everyone the invitation named, inside or outside the company.
We changed three things. Note taking now comes from one service we have approved and configured, which sends summaries only to the organiser, who decides whether to share them. Our meeting platform holds unrecognised participants in the lobby, so a bot cannot join a call unannounced, and connections between other note taking services and our calendars are blocked. Anyone recording a meeting with an external party must say so at the start, and the recording stops when the external guests leave.
We also looked at what else had been connected to calendars across the company. There were eleven more meeting assistants, two of them on accounts of people who no longer worked for us.
A tool that attends meetings for you also speaks for you. It is worth knowing who it speaks to.
– Serguey Shinder
