No one likes to attend meetings, because generally they’re a waste of perfectly good time.

If you want to believe Otter CEO Sam Liang, soon you won’t be able to complain anymore – because AI can do it for you.

Liang’s AI startup offers transcription and automated note-taking services, and he believes a “working prototype” of a work avatar able to attend meetings will soon be a thing.

AI will be able to attend meetings in your place by the end of 2024, if you believe him. There it can take notes, answer and ask questions, and generally probably be more interactive than you would be in its place.

I’m sure all of the owners and managers are out there scrambling, because the idea that remote workers don’t actually have to check in at all sounds more than a little isolating.

Liang says the avatars will have to go through several stages before they’re working well enough to actually take your place in a meeting, but he definitely believes it’s the wave of the future.

“It needs to have the knowledge and emotional intelligence to participate in a productive way.”

In his view, managers should be happy with these advancements, since it would (in theory) free up their actual employees to be more productive while the AI sits in the meeting.

If you’re someone who sits in meetings all day, I’m sure your ears have already perked up.

Drawbacks could be the further isolation of staff from each other and their direct managers, and the dreaded ability to track what remote employees are actually doing with their time.

A year seems like a generous estimate, if you ask me.

That said, there’s probably no way to stop this wave of AI-at-work that tech is demanding we accept.

Hopefully we can all learn how to float in record time.

If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.