AI meeting assistants are packed with powerful features to improve employee productivity and meeting workflows. So, which AI tool is best for your organization?

For many business professionals, opening a weekly calendar app can be fraught with anxiety. Among their concerns: How do they find time for heads-down, productive work with so many meeting blocks? How can they keep track of post-meeting to-dos? What if they join a meeting late or not at all — are they going to miss critical discussions and decisions?

As enterprises look to ease these concerns and address employee experience challenges, they may consider certain technology to improve meeting workflows and outcomes.

In Metrigy research on employee experience conducted in 2022, 55% of 250 companies studied globally had already identified in-meeting assistance for providing summaries and logging action items, notes and decisions to have the highest value among various types of AI-driven video meeting functions. Fast-forward to 2024, and creating meeting summaries has become generative AI’s top use case for employee interactions, with 80% of nearly 700 companies studied globally already using or testing this type of meeting assistance, according to Metrigy’s “AI for Business Success: 2024-25” study.

What to expect in an AI meeting assistant

AI meeting assistants serve many purposes before, during and after meetings. At a base level, using advanced functionality, such as machine learning and automation, AI meeting assistants offload tasks such as scheduling and rescheduling, meeting transcription and translation, notetaking, and creation of meeting recaps and summaries. Knowing AI has their backs, meeting participants can stay focused on the ongoing discussion or presentation and save time by not having to listen to meeting recordings for missed comments. As a result, meeting assistants can improve efficiency, boost productivity, and enable individuals and teams to reap more value from meetings, while, at the same time, making the meeting experience itself more enjoyable for all.

Naturally, beefing up AI meeting assistants has become a priority for meeting app providers, such as Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Zoom, as well as for standalone vendors vying for recognition. Many of these providers have tapped the power of generative AI to give their meeting assistants new and improved capabilities.

Beyond the basics, IT leaders should evaluate AI meeting assistants for their ability to support more advanced features and functionality, such as the following:

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New collaboration applications and features are rapidly transforming employee and customer engagement. To achieve maximum business benefit, regulated companies must be able to take advantage of these capabilities while also meeting compliance requirements. Failure to implement a proactive and future proof strategy not only reduces productivity, but potentially raises risk of non-compliance from employee use of non-permitted applications. In this webinar we’ll share approaches and best practices for ensuring that companies can achieve maximum value from their collaboration investments, while also meeting appropriate compliance requirements. Attendees will learn:

Say “Yes” to UCC Compliance for Better User Productivity and Lower Risk

Presented by: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy
Dan Nadir, Chief Product Officer, Theta Lake
Garth Landers, Director of Product Marketing, Theta Lake

Date: April 11, 2024
Time: 12:00 pm ET

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AI, especially GenAI, present new concerns as older ones linger.

There’s no rest for the weary, especially those weary communication pros responsible for securing their workplace collaboration environments against internal and external threats. Today’s security landscape is one that is constantly evolving, at an ever-increasing pace, as new applications enter the workspace, and new features quickly become available for existing apps.

These two trends, now largely driven by the introduction of AI, especially generative AI, features require a rethinking of security and compliance approaches.

Over the years Metrigy has tracked how companies secure their communications, collaboration, and customer engagement applications and platforms. Unfortunately, as I’ve noted in the past, the results aren’t good. For example, in our last study of 440 companies, published in Q2-2023, just 37% of participants said their company had a structured plan for securing their WC apps. Preliminary data from our 2024 study, scheduled for release in March 2024, show roughly the same result. Despite ever increasing attacks on collaboration apps, the needle simply isn’t moving!

Attack risks are continuing to grow as well. Consider:

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The UCaaS market continues to grow, both in adoption as well as in capabilities. Technologies like generative AI offer the potential to transform how we engage with one another, and with our data. At the forefront of this transition is Cisco through both its devices and application portfolio. In this MetriSight we’ll get Geoff’s insights on how the UCaaS market is evolving and what customers can expect to see in 2024 and beyond.

Enterprise Connect, the annual rite of spring for the enterprise communications, collaboration, and CX industries, is fast-approaching. As always, Metrigy analysts Robin Gareiss, Irwin Lazar, Diane Myers, and Beth Schultz will be participating in the conference program, bringing their research-based insights on a variety of topics, from 911 compliance to AI for CX, cloud phone migration, employee experience, and more.

Below, for your planning convenience, is a quick look by track at who’s speaking, on what topic, and when. We look forward to seeing all our industry friends, and meeting new ones. If you’re interested in meeting with Metrigy analysts at Enterprise Connect, and haven’t already engaged with us, please reach out via [email protected].

AI & Automation

Hannover Re Case Study: Focus on Automation Ahead of AI – In this session, Irwin sits down with Douglas Tubaugh, VP of technology architecture and solutions at Hannover Re. This reinsurance group is looking to transform existing processes and as it evaluates a broad-based generative AI rollout in office tools. Attend this fireside chat on Monday, March 25, at 10:00 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.

CX/Contact Center

Collaboration Platforms & UC

Managing the Migration from On-Prem to the Cloud – Metrigy’s research shows that less than 40% of companies have adopted UC-as-a-service (UCaaS) globally. Many of those that haven’t yet will, and as they do they’ll need to take care in planning. If not, at risk is service continuity, security, and ease of use. Diane, along with insiders from GoTo, Mitel, Oracle, and RingCentral, will discuss the challenges of transitioning calling to the cloud. This session is on tap for Tuesday at 3:45 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Data & Analytics

Finding the Hidden Value in Your Collaboration Data – Collaboration data can prove a treasure trove of data for companies looking to better understand—and motivate—employees, or to find guidance for policy, technology, and workplace decisions. In this session, Beth will lead a conversation among thought leaders from Bandwidth, IR, Microsoft, and Vyopta on which data sources to use, and the value to be gained in doing so. Join this panel on Tuesday from 3:45 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.

General Session

Where Is Technology Taking the Employee Experience? – Beth will participate in a general session aimed at exploring the evolving state of employee experience—and the role AI and other technologies are playing. Join her, along with other analysts, on Thursday, March 28, from 10:00 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.

Security & Compliance

We’ll see you in Orlando!

Gen AI will greatly simplify, and speed up, management of UC apps and devices.

As a wave of generative AI copilots and virtual assistants have entered the market, generative AI is now poised to drastically change the way businesses and service providers manage and operate applications and networks. Much attention has been focused on the copilots that streamline productivity-related tasks. Case in point: Last year at Webex One Cisco introduced the Webex AI Assistant. Like competing virtual assistants (or copilots), Webex AI Assistant offers generative AI (Gen AI) capabilities such as meeting summarization, action item capture, and content creation assistance.

GEN AI FOR IT ADMINS

However, Cisco also announced that it was bringing generative AI capabilities to Control Hub, its administration and performance management platform for Webex and collaboration devices. These new capabilities provide IT administrators with powerful new tools to perform configuration tasks, or to troubleshoot network and application problems. These new Gen AI capabilities offer the potential to drastically change the way IT administrators manage moves/adds/changes/deletions as well as respond to application performance issues.

Currently, performing routine tasks such as configuring an endpoint or checking device health require administrators to navigate a series of screens. Troubleshooting may require also clicking through to a number of screens to identify a device or user and determine recent activity that could have caused the issue. With a generative AI assistant, the traditional menus are replaced by a conversational interface. Via this, bot administrators can perform routine tasks or conduct troubleshooting. More importantly, the bot can suggest next steps, highlight information that may be helpful for troubleshooting, and learn from actions taken to resolve the issue.

In Cisco’s case, generative AI capabilities within Control Hub extend to network infrastructure components such as wireless routers. As someone who once aspired to obtain Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification, the idea of a generative AI bot replacing hours of training, poring over user manuals, drilling down through menus, and even typing out command-line interface interactions is exciting. For administrators, such capabilities offer significant potential to reduce training costs and to speed the time it takes to perform administrative management tasks or to respond to application and device outages.

GEN AI FOR AIOPS

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The collaboration industry is closely watching appetite to pay for generative AI – and Metrigy’s research has shown how willing and how much companies are ready to spend.

As 2024 unspools, we’re certain to see generative AI as the persistent thread running through product announcements from collaboration application vendors, just as it will for employee experience platform providers, as I noted in my previous post. The implications of this technology are simply too big to ignore.

GENERATIVE AI FOR COLLABORATION

My colleague, Irwin Lazar, president and principal analyst for workplace collaboration technologies at Metrigy, sees generative AI as being nothing short of transformational in terms of how we collaborate and communicate in the next year and beyond. He points to many examples of generative AI-powered capabilities now available or coming from collaboration providers.

For video meetings: Invited attendees, whether in attendance or not, could receive meeting summaries and recaps. Attendees joining late could receive notes to catch them up on what they’ve missed prior to signing in. Attendees who do not speak the language of the speaker or other participants could request auto-translation or transcriptions. Meeting hosts could get sentiment analysis on participant reactions and conversational input throughout a meeting.
For team messaging: Employees could get assistance composing and modifying messages or receive summaries of messaging threads.
For email: Employees could get writing assistance, including tone and style.
Generative AI, perhaps like no technology before it, has gone from general awareness to widespread familiarity and use in short order. In Metrigy’s December 2023 global research study on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of unified communications as a service, which includes meetings and messaging, 85.5% of 386 participating companies said they consider themselves “very familiar” with generative AI assistants.

This is a case in which company size does not matter; for this study, we gathered input from companies both large and small. However, most fell within the midsize range of between 251 and 2,500 employees, with the mean employee count at 1,651 and mean annual revenue of $3.05 billion.

WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR GEN AI

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Metrigy recently gathered data from almost 400 companies on the true cost of operating cloud-based unified communications services including calling, meetings / video conferencing, and messaging. Join us as we share real-world insights into:

Unified Communications as a Service – What Are Enterprises Really Spending?

Presented by: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date: March 12, 2024
Time: 11:00 am ET

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A new crop of video conferencing standards could help boost performance, but not every standard will be adopted by every vendor.

Video conferencing relies on a series of standards and protocols for video encapsulation and session management. Encapsulation standards, for example, define how video and audio are captured, converted to digital format, transmitted between endpoints and decoded.

Video conferencing standards for signaling control session establishment, teardown and management. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is widely supported for video session management, although some older systems may rely on the H.323 protocol that predates the development of SIP. In addition, some vendors use proprietary approaches to build additional functionality into their video conferencing applications.

Encapsulation protocols digitize audio and video for transmission across data networks. For audio, the open source, royalty-free Opus codec has emerged as the most widely used encapsulation approach. Other popular audio codecs include SILK — initially developed by Skype — as well VoIP encapsulation standards, such as the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) G.711/G.722/G.729 for voice, providing either uncompressed or compressed audio capture.

For video, popular codecs include ITU H.264, which has several variants, as well as the open source Advanced Video Coding codec. Additional video encapsulation options include Google’s royalty-free open source VP9 and previous versions. H.264 is widely supported by video conferencing vendors, while VP9 is widely used in web browsers, like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) is another widely supported technology to enable voice and video conferencing from within web browsers without the need for plugins.

It’s worth noting that vendors often use open source codecs to form the lowest common denominator for interoperability. They may then add further functionality, such as better support for lossy networks or integrated features, like chat and whiteboards, in their own way.

What’s new in video conferencing standards?

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