I am lucky. On average, I’m only on video conference calls about five hours a week. I have friends and colleagues who burn so many hours on camera every day!
I’ve been doing video conferencing since the 1990s — when you needed a dedicated ISDN line and $1,000 worth of audio-video gear. Today, you open your laptop and you’re ready to go, even if you’re at McDonald’s. At the time, when it worked, it was interesting. Today…, not so much.
Although most people call it zoom fatigue, you’ll find it on any video conferencing platform. Another name for the same effect is MEGO, short for “My Eyes Glaze Over”. You know how it goes. A combination of boredom, increased conversation, and lack of focus on the meeting, and soon you’ll be snoozing like grandpa after a big lunch.
Zoom and its competitors know all about this trend. And lately, they’re trying to combine visual tricks and AI to make meetings more lively and productive.
Visual games have been with us for quite some time. Who can forget “I’m not a cat!” meme when a misused filter made a lawyer appear as a white kitten with gray markings and big eyes during a civil forfeiture hearing on Zoom in February 2021?
Now, that sort of thing has — for better or worse — become more advanced. Apple Vision Pro users, for example, can now use CGI avatars (Personas) in Zoom meetings. Individuals, you can remove the backgrounds of your meeting participants and “pin” their real-time avatars to your physical workspace. (I have no doubt that those avatars will soon be able to roam your augmented reality space.)
I find it more fun than practical for business meetings. But I can see how Microsoft’s Mesh, when used with Microsoft Teams and local audio, could be useful by allowing avatars to “step away” from the main meeting for private conversations.
Another meeting technology that I can see seriously taking off involves having your avatar, but not you, attend the meeting. Thanks to the Microsoft 365 Copilot chatbot and Google’s Duet AI for Workspace, we can already get meeting minutes from meetings we didn’t actually attend. Why not “pretend” we’re there when we’re actually ordering a Big Mac?
Other tools, such as Zoom’s AI Companion, are already making meetings more productive by presenting meeting summaries, identifying action items, and encouraging people to share next steps. Personally, I’ve been doing this for a while by manually running my favorite voice transcription program, Otter.AI, with video conferencing programs. Today, the Otter AI assistant for Zoom meetings can do this on autopilot.
That’s all neat and tidy, but I’m not sure they’ll help much. For example, if I recorded a meeting to my avatar to prepare her for what I needed to know and act on, why wasn’t it an email first?
Of course, if there is a conversation – that’s a different story. But if most of the avatars attend our meetings, nothing is happening. So what’s the matter?
Avatars and AI aren’t really making video conferencing meetings more productive. While they can be fun and helpful, they don’t address the root causes so many meetings are deadly slow.
As my friend Alfred Poore (he’s my video meeting consultant and founder of The 75% Solution) told me, “I firmly believe that there is no such thing as ‘zoom fatigue.’ Instead, I believe That people are experiencing ‘bad Zoom fatigue,’ which is not that different from the ‘bad conference room meeting fatigue’ we’ve been suffering from for generations. It’s just that the majority of Zoom (and Teams and Google Meet and webinars and all those platforms) meetings are not prepared and executed with intention.
In particular, Gharib believes that you “need to properly organize the meeting itself – ‘this meeting could be an email’ – with the type and direction of information flow needed to achieve these objectives. needs to be analyzed with objectives.”
For example, if the boss only tells people what’s in the next quarter at a meeting, it might as well be a webinar instead of a video conference. Or, if there’s a meeting to determine what’s next quarter, include only those who are planning what’s next, not everyone else and their assistant. Your assistants will be well decamped with meeting minutes and action items.
Yes, sometimes video conferences are necessary and helpful. Yes, AI tools can make them more productive. And, yes, I would be happy for a meeting where I was represented by an avatar of my dog Telly and my editor by her Lil’ Joe. It would be fun, at least once. But for video conferencing to be truly useful, we need organization and planning, not technical gimmicks.