Let’s face it, virtual meetings can be painful. Have you ever joined a last-minute video conferencing meeting only to realize you don’t know who half the people are or what they do? Or participated in a large meeting where someone forgot to hit mute and decides it’s the perfect time to transcribe their doctoral thesis. These are the kinds of meeting experiences that give distributed collaboration a bad reputation, but artificial intelligence (AI) is about to change all of that.

AI has the power to make our meetings more efficient, productive and pleasant. This new era of teamwork is called cognitive collaboration. It’s the application of AI and machine learning to add contextual intelligence to the entire collaboration experience. Here are just a few examples of how cognitive collaboration can transform your entire meeting experience:

Before the Meeting

• A zero-touch digital assistant helps remove mundane tasks like joining a meeting, calling colleagues and adding people to your call.
• If you join from a conference room, the device in the room knows who you are and asks if you’d like to join your meeting.

During the Meeting

• Detailed information about participants’ work history, blog posts, company and links to social media accounts are available directly in your meeting, so you don’t have to search to learn about your meeting participants.
• Facial recognition lets you put a face to a name, so when there are multiple participants in a conference room, you can easily identify the people on screen.
• Keyboard tapping, dogs barking, and other disruptive background noises are automatically detected, and the offending party is alerted with a suggestion to mute.

After the Meeting

• Transcripts of your meeting are available, so you can search for action items or quickly catch up on what you missed in a meeting.
• Collaboration continues in a dedicated space for internal and external participants where you can share files, meetings recordings and a meme or two.

The before, during, and after scenario I describe above is only part of what we’re introducing into Cisco Webex. You can learn more about cognitive collaboration on Webex.com. And if you’d like to dive deeper into the topic of AI-driven collaboration, read the white paper “The Future of Collaboration: How AI is Transforming the Way We Work.”

If interested, check out Webex Meetings or Webex Teams for free:

https://www.webex.com/pricing/free-trial.html