Presented by Calendly
When meetings are bad, they’re awful -- for productivity, for employee engagement and for the bottom line. But when they’re good, they’re very good, according to Calendly’s inaugural State of Scheduling Report. And across the board, employees think their mission-critical meetings could be even better using AI, with 94% excited about the possibilities that AI and automated scheduling can unlock for them, says Stephen Hsu, CPO of Calendly.
“When complicated technologies and burdensome administrative tasks are removed, meetings have a unique ability to drive authentic connections and bring teams together to accomplish more,” Hsu explains.
The study, which surveyed 1,200 professionals in the U.S. and U.K. about scheduling, meetings and time management -- plus how AI will eventually affect them all -- corroborates Hsu’s belief. Successful individuals and companies actually do consider meetings essential to their success, contrary to the old chestnut that fewer meetings make you more productive.
61% of surveyed employees are spending three to five-plus hours per week in meetings that contribute to company goals and OKRs. Of that cohort, 85% admit feeling productive to very productive on a given work day.
So why do meetings have such a bad rap?
“What people really resent are unproductive meetings,” Hsu explains. “They resent the busywork around the meeting lifecycle -- finding times to meet, building agendas, taking notes, managing follow-up and so on. They resent that lost time, because it’s time they’d rather channel into something strategic and ambitious.”
AI is poised to take back all the time sunk into manual coordination and across disparate tools, leveling up the power of team meetings across the organization. 30% of employees are all in, believing that AI will free them to focus on essential tasks such as professional development and mentoring others.
The roadblocks to meeting lifecycle success
The time invested into managing meetings, at every level of an organization, has become essentially a subconscious -- yet costly -- behavior. Employees are now accustomed to bouncing back and forth between productivity tools to accomplish tasks, and that time adds up.
For instance, 21% of sales and marketing professionals use a minimum of three different tools to schedule meetings. It’s a clear contributor to why 25% of all employees spend up to three to four hours a week -- or half a work day -- in scheduling those meetings.
If there’s any consensus around the impact of AI, it’s that increased productivity, enabling outcome-oriented actions, is proving to be among its most profound use cases. The study found that 32% of employees would turn to more strategic planning and creative projects if AI gave them back time in their day.
“Scheduling automation in service of getting meetings done in an effective way can improve the bottom line,” said Hsu. “The real ROI opportunity for AI is to optimize that experience and create an adaptable entity that pulls the data and the people a meeting needs in at any point in the workflow.”
A look at the AI-powered meeting lifecycle
Across the entire automation landscape, whether it’s Zapier, Microsoft Power Automate, Salesforce Flow or any other organization, workflows are rigid, based on logic. One action in a system triggers the next and the next in a strict, rules-based framework, which makes it susceptible to easily break down.
AI placed at the center will already have an inventory of all the systems in play, with no rigid flow in the middle. It can skip all the steps in between to simply grab the information it needs, with a focus on the outcome, tapping the human-in-the-loop when necessary and incorporating that feedback to plan downstream needs at any point in the funnel.
In this market, AI-powered meetings will have the most impact on recruiting and sales, Hsu says. The economy continues to show signs of moving away from a recession, and these industries look at meetings as a signal of optimism and growth. On the recruiting side, companies are starting to add positions back to their rosters -- Salesforce announced in September its plan to hire nearly 3K employees.
However, as companies ramp up again, recruiting bandwidth will be a major constraint. HR professionals -- 46% of them -- already spend the equivalent of four weeks a year scheduling meetings, according to the State of Scheduling Report. That’s a month they could have spent focused on sourcing top talent and onboarding new candidates.
Calendly platform data also indicates that sales and marketing teams are spending more time in meetings, scheduling 8.5% more meetings in September 2023 compared to year-over-year. Not surprising given traditional companies, enterprise or not, are primarily sales-led.
“In the sales-led world, your salespeople need to engage with customers to show them the value of the product,” Hsu adds. “The larger the company, the bigger and more complex the buying cycle, the more people involved in the decision, whether it’s procurement, IT, the head of revenue or the head of HR -- and that means many more meetings and many more calendars to coordinate.”
The evolution of the AI meeting platform
Today, AI’s primary use case for meetings lives in meeting assistance, such as bots that transcribe meetings and offer insights afterward. It’s a feature that many folks will grow accustomed to, similar to the way most meeting participants now assume a call will be recorded, and its usefulness will eventually catch on. But over the next three years, the AI piece is going to evolve into something more, Hsu believes.
“AI will likely play a more central role in pulling in the right humans at the right time, for the right meetings, identifying who has relevant expertise or knowledge to drive the most effective, efficient meeting possible,” he explains.
For example, a salesperson wouldn’t need to do a discovery call at the top of the sales funnel. Instead, AI might already know that the customer is familiar with the company’s value proposition, and would like to start with a demo instead of a sales pitch. With that insight, the AI would pair the customer with the sales engineer right from the start.
The opportunity ahead
The future of the AI-powered meeting lifecycle is currently in flux, but there is a broad array of avenues forward, Hsu says.
“All of the siloed players [Calendly, Otter, Gong, Zoom, etc.] are sitting on top of a meeting experience that nobody owns right now,” Hsu explains. “There’s an opportunity for us to bring so much of that together in a platform, so it’s a seamless experience tied together by an AI that has context for everything -- and that means a more seamless customer experience and a better, more seamless host experience.”
Fundamentally, any kind of truly innovative, full-function productivity tool can’t consist of simply adding AI to an existing functionality, he adds.
“Starting with traditional productivity features rather than AI first means they’re not much differentiated from any other players in the space who already have market dominance,” Hsu says.
Rather, achieving real differentiation requires going back to the drawing board and starting with AI at the heart of the product, leveraging the technology in ways that hit the elusive “amaze-and-delight” spot.
What AI means for Calendly, Hsu says, is a comprehensive meeting lifecycle platform that maximizes the effectiveness of every external meeting by helping users intelligently schedule, prepare, engage and follow up. With access to the right information at the right time, AI will optimize every meeting, delivering on its true value.
“We’ve found that to be successful, players in the AI-powered productivity space need to completely change the way they think,” he adds. “An AI-first product should understand what a user needs, give it to them within moments -- and always deliver an ah-ha feeling.”
Take a deep dive into Calendly’s State of Scheduling Report, and sign up for Calendly’s AI-powered scheduling waitlist right here.
Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.