Microsoft Copilot boasts that users can attend 3 meetings at a time—employees are furious

In the ad, the user boasts: “Can I be in three meetings at once?” “Look at me,” finished the wrinkled woman at the computer. The actual office workers were not sold at the event.

“I’m not an expert on Microsoft Copilot, but what feature allows this to work?” said one tech worker in an Instagram video responding to the ad. “This means they got an AI for him at the meeting, but I haven’t heard about that feature yet.”

“They’re marketing this like crazy and I wonder how productive it will be in the world if a third of the attendees are these AI people,” commented one user. “Most meetings can be a well-written email.”

“A pilot, who allows burnout, overwork, low pay and premature death,” said another.

Copilot, launched by Microsoft365 in November 2023, is one of many productivity tools introduced by technology companies that promise AI bot stand-ins to take notes and summarize phone meetings. It’s a result of the rapid increase in meetings—and the growing frustration of the people who have to attend them.

As of 2020, Microsoft Teams users have tripled the amount of time they spend in meetings, according to Microsoft’s September 2022 blog post, with overlapping meeting rates rising to 46%. A Microsoft spokesperson said good luck, “Copilot can help users summarize a missed meeting about 4 times faster than non-Copilot users,” citing the company’s internal research.

But the anonymous rant about the program is true, according to Jeanine Turner, a professor of management and director of the communications, culture and technology program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Microsoft has even admitted it: Too many meetings. And instead of solving the problem with apps and tools, Turner said, Microsoft Copilot is the best way to treat the symptom of a systemic problem—and at worst, it’s causing a huge cultural flaw in the workplace.

“Microsoft Copilot solves a small problem that arose because of all these other factors that create a lot of meetings,” he said. Good luck. “You see how that doesn’t solve the systemic problem with too many meetings. It allows people to attend more meetings. Because three-why did you stop at three?”

Why you can’t trust your digital twin

Tech companies are starting to push the boundaries of what AI can do in meetings. Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan hopes to create an AI avatar, or “digital twin,” to attend meetings on behalf of employees. The feature will eventually be able to answer more emails and answer phone calls, Yuan said.

“You and I can have more time to interact with people, but not for work,” said Eric Yuan. The Verge earlier this month. “Why don’t you spend more time with your family? Why not focus on other creative things, give back your time, give back to the community and society to help others, right?”

But Turner said these AI bots allow attendees to get out of the way: “No one ever wants to be in a meeting,” he said. As there are many excuses for indifference, “there is more and more separation between this relationship between people and what they are talking about.”

From management’s point of view, isolated meeting attendees are missing out not only on the automatic watercooler interactions that promote teamwork, but also on the magic of coaxing employees to solve a challenging problem and create unique solutions.

“A lot of awkward conversations like work don’t happen,” she said.

Without disconnecting people there could be a logistical nightmare, Turner said. Sure, your AI double may be taking perfect notes, but now you, the employee or the manager have to go through all those notes. Without attending the meeting in person, they also have no idea what the most important summary points are. What’s next in this confusion—employing AI tools to determine which parts of the AI-generated notes summary are most important?

“Now we’re getting cut off from our job,” Turner said. “They’re really perpetuating the madness,” he added.

Too many meetings

Not only can AI bots pose a threat to workplace connectivity, they also perpetuate the pandemic-era problem of overcrowded meetings that remain entrenched in post-pandemic workplace culture. Turning to Zoom and other digital productivity tools in March 2020 was a second choice for many managers made out of necessity, but not necessity now.

“We had 48 hours, basically…[to] find out how we can deal with the fact that we can no longer be in person,” said Turner. “We solved that – in a time of global crisis – with Band-Aid solutions.”

These temporary solutions have become problems in themselves: Not only did the onslaught of remote meetings account for 300 million daily Zoom users in April 2020—but those meetings are not guaranteed to be a source of productivity. About 30% of employees complete unrelated tasks during Zoom meetings, such as answering emails or editing a document. Retailer Asos blamed its virtual meetings on the company’s sluggish recovery after COVID, it told employees in an internal letter this week.

Meetings have lost power and energy, Turner argued, because they happen with frequency—but not urgency.

“We use them as a way to kick the can down the road, when we should really be thinking, What are we doing that needs a meeting?” he said.

Copilot’s promise to free workers from mundane tasks may not solve the problem of workplace meetings, but it can still provide a useful tool, Turner said: For one thing, it may take better notes than workers, and for workers with different learning and communication styles, such as people who are sensitive to conflict, those perfect notes can be a way to follow up with a manager or co-worker on a specific issue.

The systemic problems caused by too many meetings mean that programs like Copilot aren’t inherently dangerous to workplace culture, Turner suggested, but they need intent to make them really work. This is an uphill battle: Managers don’t have a history of intentionally planning meetings with Zoom, so why would they start making a point of figuring out how to introduce cutting-edge technologies like AI bots?

“Can be [an efficient] the arbiter of time,” said Turner. “It’s just that, we have to think and be careful how we are used.”