The collaboration market has expanded over the past decade and connected millions of teams across a scattered workforce. According to Markets and Markets, the Collaboration market is slated for further growth and expected to reach $48 billion in revenue by 2024. BlueJeans’ Chief Product Manager, Guillaume Vives, told me they see a trend of vendors focusing on the number of meetings they enable, rather than the quality of those meetings:
“Too often, Collaboration software vendors focus on enabling more meetings”
He continued, BlueJeans believes this to be the wrong approach to Collaboration. As such, they recently surveyed 700 professionals and found that 67 percent of experts said they have more weekly meetings than they used to. One-third of respondents even felt their weekly meetings were a ‘waste of time.’ These findings have massive economic implications, to the tune of more than $400 billion companies spend each year on ‘meeting waste,’ according to BlueJeans.
To accompany the economic impacts of ‘meeting waste,’ employees said they also felt they wasted valuable time they could otherwise spend being productive. BlueJeans saw this as a sign to launch ‘Smart Meetings,’ an attempt at remedying the problem by giving employees back the valuable time they could spend working.
How Smart is ‘Smart Meetings’ by BlueJeans?
The short answer is very smart. But, I’ll let you be the judge. Smart Meetings delivers insights from meetings before, during, and after they occur. BlueJeans achieves this via crowd-sourced meeting notes, real-time transcription, and video highlight reels. Everyone invited to meetings receives these insights – even if they don’t attend.
According to BlueJeans’ survey, they found that 48 percent of respondents said they attend meetings because of a fear of missing out. Smart Meetings, therefore, caters to a growing number of meeting invitees who may not want to be there in the first place. In line with this notion, Vives told me:
“We designed Smart Meetings to give workers time back. The combination of human and machine intelligence is so well designed, they may choose to miss a meeting without any professional setback”
“The highlights, notes, action items, and recording will keep employees engaged with their work and put more time in their schedule.”
Smart Meetings brings a world of value to BlueJeans’ offering and has the power to impact the way teams capture/share workplace insights. It could even transform the way enterprise leadership make key decisions, and deliver on action items from meetings.
Forcing Us to Rethink the Way We Meet
Through innovative features such as the ability to view automatically curated video highlights of the most critical meeting moments, employees can stay on top of the most pressing deliverables from meetings. Add in an interactive meeting hub, meeting summaries, and the capability of downloading meeting notes, recordings, etc. for offline consumption, and BlueJeans is the perfect model for how to boost workplace productivity.
They wholeheartedly believe that productivity is the result of improved collaboration, which I agree with. Its developers also want to force workers to rethink the way they meet, and what it means to be productive with the help of its intelligent meeting platform, Smart Meetings.
