Bill Gates finds the meeting summary feature of AI most useful
An ASI article previously reported that in his Dec 2023 blog post about AI, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said: “We are just at the beginning of this transition right now. This is an exciting and confusing time, and if you haven’t figured out how to make the best use of AI yet, you are not alone.” He would further say: “Think back to the beginning of the internet. At first, you probably didn’t know many people who were using it, but it became more common over time.”
Today, Gates spends a lot of time in meetings as part of his ongoing work in public health and artificial intelligence. And when he is in the room or on the call, you can bet it’s going to get extremely detailed, according to Chris Williams, the former VP of HR at Microsoft, who worked closely with the Microsoft cofounder for eight years. Gates “was always curious, always wanted to understand, always drilling for more detail,” Williams wrote last year for Business Insider.
“I’d say the feature I use the most is the meeting summary, which is integrated into [Microsoft] Teams, which I use a lot,” Gates said in an interview with The Verge. “The ability to interact and not just get the summary, but ask questions about the meeting, is pretty fantastic.” For him, each meeting contains a lot of material to digest after the fact — a task he says AI is well suited to assist with.
The tool Gates is referring to is Microsoft’s Copilot, powered by the company’s partnership with OpenAI and available as an add-on feature for several Microsoft 365 office apps. Copilot allows users to “find and use info that’s buried in documents or lost in conversations, and get things done in whole new ways using the power of AI,” the company says. Of course, Microsoft’s offering is one of several AI tools that are popping up to help office workers spend less time dealing with meetings.
And Gates is not alone in using machine learning to lighten his workload: a survey by Hubspot last year found workers are using AI tools to save up to two hours per day on tasks like scheduling meetings, note-taking, and data entry. In some cases, Copilot users have said the tool enables them to skip meetings altogether in favor of catching up on the AI recap. As one of AI’s most vocal supporters, Gates is clear-eyed about the technology’s limitations.
“If it’s a problem that humans are not good at dealing with, then present techniques don’t create some novel approach,” he said in another interview earlier this year. In short, current AI models are just a lot faster at performing well-defined tasks that humans currently do, albeit more slowly, like transcribing and summarizing meeting notes. And while smarter meetings might not be the most exciting use-case imaginable for AI, the potential savings are significant.
Gates also previously predicted that AI could transform education in the next five to 10 years by delivering content tailored to a student’s learning style. He suggested AI could engage students by learning what motivates them and what causes them to lose interest in subjects. While he said teachers likely wouldn’t become redundant, they may need to adapt to the new technology. In his most recent post, Gates called the AI education tools being piloted today “mind-blowing.”
Reference: Bill Gates reveals what he uses AI for most (msn.com)
