Elevate Recorded Meetings to Enterprise Knowledge

Scott King 

All right, Chris, here we are in another meeting. Everyone has lots of meetings all the time and they’re all recorded. It’s interesting to think there were always recordings in meetings, but it was manual. Years ago when I was watching Mad Men or some old TV show, there’s always somebody in there writing shorthand and then I guess the shorthand would go into longhand and then all the action items would come out of that. 

Chris Kraus 

Well, they would, I think it was the notes that they would type up. A human would type up the summary of a meeting, right? 

Scott King 

Yeah, there were always summaries because I guess people didn’t pay attention even then even though they only had two to four meetings a week and they still needed all the summaries but there were all these action items that came out of the meetings. Now our meetings are online. Think about the number of podcasts there are, right? There’s thousands, hundred thousand podcasts, I don’t know. And all of these have summaries coming out of it. A meeting has a summary. We can record Zoom calls, Teams calls. You got the call agents that integrate with the phone systems, or you’ve got Fireflies and you got Otter, and they get these summaries. But the summaries, what I find, a lot of times they’re too short. 
Right? Hey, I remember something in this meeting, but it’s not in the summary. The AI is trying to figure out what’s important, not necessarily 100% accurate. That seems, if we use all these things as a crutch, what do you think is going to happen with the long tail of a meeting?

Chris Kraus

Well, the problem is if it says, and I’m multitasking, I’m not really paying attention because I’ll get the summary and I get an action item, then all of a sudden I’m, well, it said the meeting note taker said I have an action item that I agreed to, but what’s the context of that? What were we talking about? Right? The idea is it’s great that you have some high-level, but it’s what you said, it’s going to miss some points, and may say, and Chris has an action item, but okay, what were the details behind it? 

What did I have to, what was the deliverable? What was the outcome of those action items? And quite honestly, yeah, the amount of information is increased. We get, say company, inter-company emails, 50 to 100 a day. In Mad Men, they probably typed up three a month, right? They typed up a letter and it got distributed through the mail room. 

Scott King 

Well, they didn’t have email. They had interoffice mail. 

Chris Kraus 

Interoffice mail. Yeah, you got a handful a month, now we get tons of emails and then we have group chats about things. The summary of just a meeting, is it enough? Because there’s, if I have an action item, I need the context of all the other things. I have to worry about, was this discussion based on a proposal that we’re collaborating on in a group chat? Was there a distribution list? 

Because we don’t want AI to read all our personal emails. But if it is included in distribution lists that are business-oriented things, we don’t have to worry about it reading our personal stuff. And then SharePoint, where we’ve uploaded documentation, proposals, plans, those types of things. What we really need is not just an agent that can say, I have an atomic single meeting, here’s a summary. There’s not going to be enough detail there. Maybe I could fake it that I attended a meeting, but. 
I need the understanding of the details of the meeting, but that’s not valuable unless I have all the other enterprise documents, right? I need the context of the big picture. 

Scott King

Yeah, when you said SharePoint, companies have enterprise knowledge or they write down all their procedures, but that stuff never gets updated. You could use a meeting to update that. Maybe you discuss it and it becomes a piece of content, but that content in isolation. It’s like reading the Cliffs Notes of a book, right? You didn’t read the book, but you know the general idea of what’s going on, but you couldn’t pass a certification test on a book, right?

Which is important because you need the greater detail. But having all of that information, that’s interesting when you said chats. Yeah, if you had email and chat and meetings and knowledge repository, and if you had customer CRM, finance, if you had all of this in one holistic view, then. 
I would imagine that is when people ask us, Hey, I want to train my own model. Hey, I ChatGPT, but I want to train my own model. That’s what they mean. They’re, wanting to know everything about my business, but only my business. If I need that next level of information it will, I don’t have to go on a research project. I don’t have to make a meeting, right? I don’t have to generate another meeting to discuss something that I’m looking for. 

That’s the entire idea of what people are trying to get at, but it’s hard to do because all of these things live in isolation. In a meeting is where it all comes together, which is one of our core beliefs, your people can’t be your integration strategy, and that’s what people are doing every day. 

Chris Kraus

Well, in tribal knowledge, right? Some is, well, this person knows how the process one works. That person knows how process two works. We need to get them together in a meeting. If you think about these agentic platforms, the idea is it has access to all sorts of different information. But really what you want is for it to be understanding the business process itself. If you’ve, then you said, you’ve got a business process in SharePoint. These are the seven steps. 

For escalating a high-value customer and turning them around. And you’ve updated it, there’s now nine steps that are relevant for the business today. You want that inside the agentic platform, it can refer to that in the context of how do you solve something or apply that to another problem. There’s part of it’s, does the agentic platform have the concept of understanding your business process, which then leads to that second thing you just mentioned. 

Okay, it’s going to have to get to systems of record. It’s going to have to get to the CRM. It’s going to have to get to the customer ticketing system. It needs to know entitlements. What did the customer ask? What are they entitled to if they’re asking questions about that? All of a sudden, you need to integrate not only gathering the information, but also integrating with systems for the real-time data to get the context. The process is, if it’s not a high-value customer of a hundred thousand dollars a year, 
Maybe it’s a different process, and you want the agentic platforms to understand the difference between the two, but they need those data feeds to make an intelligent decision. 

Scott King

Well, that would be a way for an agent or an automation or an AI or whatever we want to call it. That would be a way for it to complete a task. I saw a demo this morning where these guys are, oh, this is the greatest platform idea, and there was a button, and it says, create task with AI. You push a button; some Gen AI wizardry creates a task for a person to do. And I said, wait a minute, this is the complete opposite. The software should do the work, not the software create the task for the person to do. It was the complete opposite. But the evaluators and the buyers and the market, they’re just confused because everyone says all these conflicting messages and nothing works together, and everybody has a point product. It’s only going to get worse. If you don’t take a look at, what is the beginning and what is the end and how do I remove steps inside there? 

That is the real goal. Back to the conversation agents or the meeting agents, they can be valuable, but they need to be integrated, you said, I can find that next level of context. A lot of times in the sales organizations, they use these meeting recording agents and they’re looking for objections, they’re looking for mentions of competitors, right? If you see one start to increase, you do need that next level of context of, why? Because a meeting summary that gets emailed to you is just more isolated data. 

Chris Kraus

Yeah. The isolation, say you decide you want to go, well, I’m just going to be the best in breed and do six different products to solve this. You’re signing up for a world of hurt integrating those. Cause every time there’s a new system, there’s a change, you have to reintegrate it six times. Thinking about a platform, an actual proper agentic platform that has the ability to integrate to multiple systems and leverage that across different capabilities, whether it’s machine learning or it’s generative AI, it’s categorizations, do that once. That’s really important because you don’t want to spend your whole life trying to say, we’d to change to a better CRM or we’d to automate that with software, but now we have to figure out how to add that to our business process. That’s a non-starter. Having a platform, an agentic platform that has multiple capabilities of helping make decisions. It has that human in the loop. Our tasks need to happen, but you want them to happen automatically. Sometimes they may require human approval. You want to include humans in that. And then sometimes it’s, well, can machine learning make that decision for me and process it along? The bigger picture is a meeting is a good starting point, but realize that’s not going to solve a bigger problem. It just gives you some information to associate with the business process. We can figure out how to solve something more elegantly. Could you have multiple agents orchestrated together to solve the problem? Sure. I’ve got an agent that is very specific to accounts payable, receivable. I have one for the product catalog. But those things have to work together to be able to solve your bigger problem. 

Scott King

I had this research in front of me, but it’s almost the more meetings you have, the more indicative of this problem, because you’re shoving people inside of this one meeting, everyone can hear all the context. Imagine if I’m trying to buy a plane ticket. To, it’s not a round trip, it’s multi-city, travelers are leaving from different cities. And the website just figures it out on its own, right? It contacts all the GDS systems and the ticketing and the banking and all that stuff, right? But imagine that in a meeting. 

You could do it, get all 16 travelers on a group call and trying to figure it out, but then it would just be a nightmare. But that’s how businesses are run today, right? They’re used to doing it that way, they’re going to continue to do it that way. And they’re going to buy point products to solve one small item. They’re going to record the meetings and then they’re going to send the summary and nothing happens, right? It just generated a transcript. From an audio file. That’s a little valuable.

Chris Kraus

Just another email that’s not high priority that I’m not going to. 

Scott King

Yeah, all right, say you are a business leader and you’re, okay, I want to, my goal is to remove the meetings, right? And make the business operate faster. Where should they start? They always ask us, well, I don’t know where to start, right? And different people say different things, where do you think, if someone was really going to try and tackle this issue, what would you say you’d do first? 

Chris Kraus

You have enterprise knowledge. You don’t want to read every email, but you want it to be included on group chat, group messages that pertain to the business process. You have teams that are specific to business problems and processes that you’re working with. You have SharePoint files and data repositories of information. You want to gather and make all those things available along with your meeting notes. The meetings are probably the last tip. Discussion of the details or something’s going to change, all those things need to be available together to be able to answer a question, which is great. But then it’s, is this something that we do on a regular basis, or do we want to automate an outcome? Do we have a hot customer call every week? Well, great. What are we doing to automate letting people know about them, to remediate the problems, and make sure everybody knows the timelines? 
The actions we all agree to do these things on a specific basis in that. We really need to step back and say, we’re not just gathering data for data. We need a business process that the agentic platform and all that data feeds into to help automate an outcome, which we talked about before. There’s no use in a single step of here’s a meeting. What do you need to do from this meeting? 

Scott King

Yeah, I think that is a good example. You said, hot customer. I’m thinking of a troubled customer or a customer that could churn, something severity one, priority one type of ticket or something. That would be a good use case. If AT&T, they have big customers and they can’t afford to lose a thousand phone lines or a hundred phone lines, right? That’s an all-hands-on-deck type thing, right? That’s a good example because then, as you, you logically how you come up with those customers, but the software doesn’t automatically tell you, right? It’s not, you could see a list, right, and click a button. 
Do this, right? But that’s the point you want to get to, right? Hey, right now, here’s your top 10 most troubled customers. Here’s the reason why. Here’s all the action items that you could do. That would be the most tenured group to do that. But essentially, the people are really just running the logic that software could do anyway. People just don’t have that set up. I think that’s a pretty good example. And it’s not really pie in the sky. You can do it. Okay, if, right now, we are, we’re recording this, but it’s a podcast. 

Chris Kraus

Yeah, everybody’s worried about customer churn and things.

Scott King

But I join all these meetings that get recorded, they give you notice ahead of time sometimes, some of the products do, hey, we’re going to record this meeting. What type of privacy ramifications should people consider? That a big deal? Because everything is recorded anyway. 

Chris Kraus

Well, everything’s recorded anyway, almost, but based on your locale, if you’re in Florida versus Texas, you may need to opt in, and usually, a Teams meeting gives you a pop-up, this is being recorded. Everybody knows, and then based on your locale, you may have to have someone audibly say, yes, I agree. I understand this is being recorded versus just notification, but there is, there’s a difference sometimes like do you want to do this with internal company meetings? Sure. And then customer-facing ones need to be a little more specific to opt in, to say, okay, you’re outside of our organization. Does this align to your organization? There are some privacy concerns in getting consent from the customer. But a lot of times if you say, oh, by the way, I’m not going to send you a link to a summary and you have to then go buy a third-party product to get the details. If you could say, and here’s a link to a conversation where you can ask questions about this because you’re a participant, I want you to have access to this data. That’s a totally different game. You could get people, there’s a value in giving them that versus, here, I recorded it, and if you get a link, all you get is, well, buy our third-party transcript summary software to get the details. There’s some value in having a holistic approach that you make it available not into your employees, but to your business partners and your customers, you’re all working from the same page. 

Scott King
When you get on a customer service phone call and you hear the beep and it’s, hey, by the way, we’re going to record this for training, but they don’t tell you if they’re training the next agent because they have a hundred percent turnover in that organization or they’re training the AI to get rid of the person that is going to quit in six months.

Either way, it’s good training data, and I think of it as the dynamic content to update all your procedures and everything. You would need some type of checks and balances, it didn’t overwrite a hard, fast business rule, something. And you said, a holistic approach when you think about the entire process across all the different organizations it’s still difficult for people because people work in one department, their budget is in one department, their reporting structure is one department. It does take someone who looks across all of the different departments, but they don’t have knowledge of all the different systems. People really don’t know how hard it is. 

And, the poor guys that are always trying to get these IT projects completed, and then you have all these little shadow IT systems, these call agents and things. It’s just, it’s a nightmare. It’s really, really difficult. But, what would you advise somebody, if I’m a department-level manager, I probably don’t care, right? If I’m a senior-level manager, I start to care. And obviously the COO, right? The person that looks at, how are we going to make more money with the employees we have? Is this a big deal? Is this going to hit their radar? 

Chris Kraus

It should because people have a lot of wild pie-in-the-sky of what AI should do, but this is something that’s a little more practical. Should AI be able to listen to a meeting, cross-reference your policies, have a general understanding of how your business process works because it’s read enough, reports on a customer project or reports on how they handled escalations with different customers. 

If the AI has read and consumed a lot of those, then it can infer and give you, at your company, this is how this is handled. There’s value in that. And as you mentioned, that’s very much across different departments because everybody has to help on certain things across different departments of the company, right?  

Scott King

All right, definitely one, record your meetings. Two, manage the content. Update your policies, but create the context, right? Plug in all of your different systems. Don’t hard-code any, don’t hard-code all this, because in six months, there’s going to be a new tool. The AI is going to be better. 
I think people will wait for the next thing all the time and you just can’t do that. I’ve been playing with these GEN-AI presentation tools. I think I’m on my third or fourth one, right? Because I keep finding a better one. But I found one that sticks. But it’s integrated into my process, it’s not a big deal to change. But that is not changing.

A model that’s trained on your business rules or changing an LLM for your people to summarize content. You definitely have to have a holistic approach and a platform approach to do this. Any closing thoughts, Chris? I think we’ve rambled on this quite a bit. 

Chris Kraus
No, it’ll be interesting. Should take this meeting and compare it to our other podcasts and see what Krista says about that. 

Scott King
Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks everyone for joining. If you want to, obviously if you want to take a holistic approach, give us a call over here at Krista.ai and we’ll help you automate anything that’s automatable.