Meetings have always been the locus of business decision-making, but it’s hard to believe that not too long ago the tracking of those decisions depended largely on one person scribbling away in the corner of the room. And then often minutes would not even be checked and evaluated by the rest of the group until they reconvened, perhaps months later.
Video conferencing brought us a permanent record, if we wanted it — but an unsearchable, unindexable mp4 file was, in most circumstances, unlikely to be reviewed in full afterwards. Great for high-stakes issues like hiring, but for everyday capture of ideas and next actions on ongoing projects, it was far from perfect. And that was even in a world before every conversation took place this way in the same app, and started to blur into one amorphous blob of thumbnails, missing even the memory cues provided by location and physical movement.
The meeting is the message
The AI element of iotum’s Callbridge product — available for fully white-label resale — addresses this problem by adding AI to meeting content, exploiting what’s good about live video and mitigating downsides. It is definitely an improvement to have decisions on the record and timestamped digitally — provided that moment can be referred to and put into action.
As iotum’s CEO and president, Jason Martin, explained, “Callbridge organises your meeting. All the work, all the key decisions, the discussion, is handed to you on a silver platter. It generates a smart summary, as well as a full transcript [which is pegged to the real-time video].
“It grabs keywords, especially agenda items and keywords, so if you’re a person with hundreds of meetings a month you can simply go into Callbridge and search for topics and keywords, to pull up all of those links to conversations, commitments, diagrams.”
It also generates a tag cloud of the keywords, which is a powerful visual cue to the meeting content when you look back through afterwards… Ah yes, that was the one where we talked about X and Y, and moved on project Z.
“We think of productivity tools as things that manufacture content, but a meeting is a form of content, and video collaboration is an emerging type of content that’s being produced in real time,” Martin continued. “Often when people talk and generate ideas, they understand things better and agree on something, and that is what’s captured by our neural network Q, the AI element of Callbridge.”
Intelligent insight for actionable inspiration
Not only is it available directly to customers via callbridge.com, but this powerful functionality is available for resale by channel partners. Callbridge has a strong partner community and is resold under private label by many companies covered by UC Today. The real impact of this functionality has transformational potential for the future of work — and a new paradigm where business decision-making is transparent and on the record, forming part of the ‘corporate mind’ as Martin describes it, the business’ own IP and operating system: “This is where collaboration is going”, he explained.
“As the AI tools get better and better, companies will be places where in the future knowledge workers just get together and talk about stuff, then AI assistants will generate the right kind of documents and plans to support that kind of work”
It’s a powerful vision for a future where the best ideas do not get lost in the noise or overlooked. Those originating ideas can focus on creation and execution instead of administration around it all.
“We’ve been building and testing this for 2 years,” Martin concluded, “with thousands of users, testing and refining it, while it learns. Not only is it ready, it’s getting better constantly”.
