AI is creeping into your meetings in ways that feel efficient but are actually dangerous. The trend looks like this:

Step one: “Since AI can record everything and summarize, we don’t need to stick to a tight meeting process. We’ll just talk and let the AI make sense of it.”

Step two: “These meetings are a time suck anyway. I’ll send my AI avatar instead. It can attend on my behalf and tell me if there’s anything important to follow up on.”

Sounds smart. In reality, it’s hollowing out your company’s nervous system.

The Drift

This trend is seductive because it looks like progress. Who doesn’t want less overhead and better notes? But what you’re actually doing is outsourcing your decision-making process.

Imagine a body outsourcing its nervous system. The signals still fire. Data still gets collected. But without the live coordination of muscles, reflexes, and intent, the body collapses.

That’s what happens when companies confuse AI notes with decision-making. The signals are there, but the organism can’t move.

The Evolutionary Purpose of Meetings

Why do we have meetings at all? Not for notes. Not for chatter.

From tribes around the fire to juries in courtrooms, meetings exist because some decisions are too complex, too consequential, and too dependent on multiple perspectives to be made alone.

Meetings are the synapses of your organizational brain. They integrate signals from across the body, synthesize reality, and decide what to do next.

Take away the live process and what’s left? Noise. Disconnection. Entropy.

Notes Aren’t Decisions

AI can give you perfect transcripts and even advice. But transcripts and advice don’t create alignment.

Decisions require:

  • A clear purpose.
  • The right people in the room.
  • A named implementer with authority.
  • A process that surfaces what’s hidden and consequential.
  • Clarity of what was decided and why.

Without those elements, nothing sticks. The “decision” dissolves into interpretations and half-remembered intentions. The team burns energy debating the same issues again next week.

Notes ≠ decisions. Confuse the two, and your meetings stop creating momentum.

How AI Helps (But Can’t Replace)

Don’t get me wrong. AI is an incredible amplifier. It can:

  • Extend memory across meetings.
  • Surface contradictions or gaps.
  • Track follow-through on commitments.
  • Reveal where the process is breaking down.

But AI cannot:

  • Understand the full context and history.
  • Truly resolve tradeoffs.
  • Create true accountability.
  • Take decisive action in the world of atoms (yet).

Those are human acts. They require skin in the game. They require presence.

Run your meetings as if AI didn’t exist. Then let AI show you where you’re drifting.

The Anatomy of a High Leverage Meeting

If you want meetings that actually move the company forward, they need a structure and process. Not bureaucracy—structure and process. Here’s the anatomy:

  1. Presence – Set the stage. Everyone shows up, centered and ready.
  2. Purpose – Why this meeting, why now?
  3. Authority – Who decides? Who facilitates? Everyone else contributes.
  4. Signals – Share the data set. Get a common view of reality.
  5. Insights – Generated from shared context.
  6. Options – Surface tradeoffs. Name the paths forward.
  7. Decision – The implementer chooses. No hiding.
  8. Commitment – Who, what, when. Documented on the spot.
  9. Reinforcement – Close clean. Align energy. Leave together.

Skip these steps and you don’t have a decision-making process—you have a discussion club.

If you’d like to learn more about this anatomy, download and read my Ten Rules for Highly Effective Meetings.

Meeting Telemetry

Here’s where AI shines: not in replacing the meeting, but in auditing it.

Imagine a telemetry dashboard that shows you:

  • % of meetings with a stated purpose.
  • % with a named implementer.
  • % that followed a sound process.
  • % that end with Who/What/When commitments.
  • % that aligned with the AI’s recommended solution (not that the AI is always right, but it’s useful to know).

Now you can see, in hard data, where your company is slipping into entropy.

This is how AI augments culture—not by “taking meetings for you,” but by amplifying human intelligence and exposing where your human process is breaking down.

The CEO Playbook

If you’re the CEO, here’s your mandate:

  • Ban “meeting by AI Note Taker.” Presence is required.
  • Use AI as an amplifier, not replacement.
  • Demand commitments, not transcripts.
  • Kill unproductive meetings and all other time sucks.
  • Don’t hold meetings to share information—hold them to make decisions.

Your company’s nervous system depends on it.

Closing

If meetings are the nervous system of your business, then AI-only note-taking is like having perfect MRI scans while the patient flatlines.

AI can make your organism sharper and faster. But only if you keep the discipline of live, structured decision-making intact.

 

📌 P.S. I’m not anti-AI. I’m pro-human. Because no algorithm can replace a leader who’s fully present.