Editorial
Once upon-a-time, humans were rather good at holding conversations. We held meetings to discuss an issue, solve a problem or meet a clear need. Before Jeff Bezos launched celebrities to the edge of space in rockets shaped liked the design dreams of adolescent boys, he had some good ideas on effective meetings, such as the "two-pizza rule." The two-pizza rule ensured a proper conversation could be had by limiting the number of people in a meeting, typically five to eight.
Meeting summaries were whatever the ‘scribe’ captured — usually a narrative in their favor (my first workplace lesson: take the meeting notes!), or a story we gleaned from the words of others. Decisions were made based on diverse input to a topic, shaped by opinions and experience. Enterprise 2.0 was going to be the place where problems met ideas, where humans connected over common goals, needs and expertise.
Fast forward to the modern workplace, where AI agents attend meetings for us and tell us what we need to know (and do). Tools generate crisp summaries we consume without context. Decisions are made through asynchronous polls rather than discussion. Enterprise social platforms increasingly feel like broadcast channels, where reacting with an emoji counts as engagement.
In trying to save time, we’ve replaced dialogue with content.
Content Management Becomes a Second Job
Instead of freeing us, our tools have created a second job: managing AI-generated material. Meeting transcripts, auto-created tasks, company news, decision summaries, analysis of voting sessions, endless AI-generated “insights,” all added to channels already overflowing with noise.
We have entered a domain of content rather than connection, where we collaborate over content instead of conversations. So much so that our collaboration spaces become the exact opposite: the need to interact with each other is reduced — either through automation or the sheer amount of ‘AI workslop’ present that’s driving us to work in isolation. In fact, employees are reporting spending two hours dealing with each instance of workslop.
What Is the Role of the Human in This?
Automation absolutely has a place. Modern work is complex, process-heavy and coordination-intensive. But when we remove the humans from the messy middle, with all of our context, questions and nuance, we end up creating more confusion later. AI tools will continue to transform how we work, such as Microsoft bringing a Project Manager Agent to Planner, where anything we let slip in a meeting will soon be magically transformed into a project plan. However, this means people may end up being accountable to AI-generated tasks that are unnecessary or just wrong if we take too much of a back seat.
There are plenty of other scenarios where, in our attempts to save time by avoiding a conversation, we spend far more time correcting things:
- Tasks assigned from a meeting we didn’t attend. We still end up back in a conversation trying to understand them.
- Managers replacing dialogue with updates. Relationships don’t form through news posts. They form through interactions.
- AI-generated meeting summaries that miss the crucial knowledge that we could have supplied, yet didn’t, as we delegated the meeting to our agent.
- Polls without discussion. Great for picking a Christmas lunch spot; terrible for decisions that require context or expertise.
Additionally, more evidence is piling up that AI overreliance in the workplace is making us lonelier. That deliberately engineering human interactions is becoming increasingly necessary. For example, encouraging time for small talk in meetings rather than focusing only on the agenda (and letting AI deal with the agenda too).
This is, however, complicated by demographic trends that show over a third of Gen Z workers fear face-to-face small talk in the office. Whether as a result of technology, or something else, the art of a conversation is not natural for everyone, and even more effort may be needed to help nurture connections at work.
How Do We Bring People Back?
Some uses of technology are no-brainers, such as automating repeatitive tasks or simplifying outputs. But if we’re creating these outputs, solving problems, building connections, then we need to be more intentional in how we get there.
- Be clear on the purpose of a meeting. If we’re not after a conversation, consider holding it in a different format, such as an asynchronous thread. If we are after a conversation, invite only the people who are expected to contribute.
- If we can’t attend, but need to be involved, don’t follow the meeting. Decline it. Stay involved in the conversation, rather than just being impacted by it.
- Know when to ask our colleagues rather than AI. If there is a complex problem, getting more inputs, experience and opinions is vital. AI is only as good as the knowledge sources available. Most useful knowledge still resides in our heads, so use this when we can’t rely on best practices and documented resources.
- Consider why we are communicating on enterprise social tools. If the purpose is to build engagement and encourage relationship building, then forget about sharing updates. Ask questions, run knowledge communities, surface the hidden facts about our people. Let them tell their stories.
- Work with AI collaboratively, not in isolation. With Copilot, for example, you can share your Copilot chat with colleagues in a page where they can also participate. This means a conversation is held with all parties, helping get to a better outcome than messaging everyone with the initial (possibly wrong) AI response.
Time-Saving Measures Don't Always Pay Off
Modern work is busy, complicated and time-consuming. Yet if we default to time-saving measures offered to us through our workplace tools, we risk spending more time trying to pick up the pieces and dealing with the unavoidable notifications.
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A good meeting is only as good as the people attending and the contributions they bring. Engagement on our collaboration platforms isn’t a token reaction, it’s building on the knowledge that’s been shared. Good content doesn’t begin with an AI-generated observation, it’s our stories that we share of experiences and people.
At a time when technology promises efficiency and AI-generated content floods our workspaces, it is easy to mistake activity for engagement and information for insight. Yet, the true value of work lies not in the volume of content produced, but in the quality of our conversations and the strength of our connections. Meaningful progress arrives through dialogue, shared stories and collective sensemaking. By reclaiming the art of conversation, we not only cut through the noise, we ensure that technology is used to serve us, rather than being the default first choice,the go-to for every issue.
Editor's Note: Read more about how modern tools are effecting our workplaces below:
- If AI Is Your Best Friend at Work, It May Be Tanking Your Social Capital — AI is becoming many of our go-to collaborators, over our colleagues. What does this do to workplace relations and what can we do about it?
- We're More Disconnected Than Ever at Work. We Need Communities Over AI for Well-Being — Building our virtual networks fell as a priority in the last few years as demands for productivity increased. It's time we change that.
- The Rise of Meetingslop — AI is turning bad meetings into worse ones, where bots, not people, fill calendars with noise instead of meaningful collaboration.
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