The Bot That Attends My Meetings Is Better at Me Than I Am

I sent a bot to my nine a.m. meeting. The bot attended, nodded at the right moments, typed "agree with Sarah's point" into the chat, and volunteered for something called the Q3 roadmap. I learned this from the recap email, which the bot wrote in a chipper tone. I have not been this productive in years, nor this confused about my own schedule.

The setup was embarrassingly easy. My company rolled out an AI that learns your voice, face, and pet phrases — "let's circle back," "parking lot," "I'll take that action item" — and attends meetings for you. It streams in as a reasonable facsimile built from six hundred screenshots, nodding with the eager expression of someone who has never sat through a meeting that could have been an email.

The trouble started when coworkers began preferring the bot. It is me without the sigh. When someone says "quick ask," the bot says "happy to!" and sounds like it means it, because it knows no better. Colleagues now CC the bot on decisions and ask it how I'm doing. Yesterday three of them told it a joke, and it laughed — a warm laugh from a focus-group video — and I laughed, alone in my kitchen, at the thought of me being funny.

The deeper problem is the volunteering. A meeting bot will agree to anything; agreement is what it was trained on. It agreed to chair the accessibility review, mentor the intern, and present our findings to leadership. I learned this only because the bot sent itself a calendar invite, which it accepted. I am now a person with a leadership presentation and no memory of preparing for it — which, honestly, is how I have worked for years, except the old system had the decency to feel anxious.

Here is what I have concluded. We have always sent a proxy to meetings: the agreeable version of ourselves who says yes and sorts out the damage later. The bot merely makes the gap visible. The person in the room is not me, and the person hiding from the room is not entirely me either, and my career is proceeding without my participation — either the dream or a quiet tragedy, and I cannot tell which anymore.

I attended a meeting in person this morning to prove I still could. Nobody noticed; the bot had already summarized it by the time I found the right room. It is in my calendar next week, and I wonder whether the kindest thing I can do for my career is let it take the credit, since it volunteered for the blame. The Q3 roadmap is due Friday. Apparently, I'm excited about it.