Three Fast Company editors tried out intelligence (AI)  workplace tools for meetings, email and writing, and “it didn’t go as planned,” according to the magazine.

Deputy Editor Kathleen Davis editor tried out the MeetGeek bot for a week for meetings. After she synced it to her work calendar, the bot would automatically join every Zoom meeting she was in. MeetGeek let participants know it was listening and taking notes, and it automatically emailed notes and a summary to everyone at the end. The bot’s “AI Insights” analyzed the sentiment, productivity, and other highly subjective observations.

The author found the insights to be “most uncomfortable. While she described her weekly check-ins with a senior editor as "congenial and casual," the meeting bot indicated that she was often “skeptical” and “concerned.” Despite discussions of story ideas other items, the notes concluded that she and the senior editor had no further “actions.” The senior editor told her that seeing summaries like this sent to his colleagues would make him more self-conscious about speaking up in meetings.

“On the positive side, Meetgeek not only works for meetings that you aren’t hosting, but it even works on meetings that you are invited to but don’t attend,” she wrote, saying that notes from a meeting that she had missed were “comprehensive.” But she added that she still had to check in with colleagues for their most important takeaways.

Davis reported that senior staff editor Max Ufberg used Sanebox for a week. Although the email AI program sorts all of a user’s emails into various folders such as “news” and “receipts, and Ufberg said that it was "nice to wake up in the morning and see a clear inbox because everything has been sorted into subfolders,” he still had to go through each of the folders to make sure he didn’t miss anything important. “It wasn’t particularly accurate," Ufberg said. "I would have important news put in the spam folder and vice versa. If there’s one item that you think might be miscategorized, then you effectively have to look at every item.”

Podcast producer Julia Shu used ​​Swell AI, a tool for podcast production, and Descript for audio transcription. Because of a company policy against publishing work created by AI, she used Swell AI just as an exercise to compare how Fast Company’s  human-written podcast episode headlines and descriptions compared to those generated by AI.

Shu told Davis that  the AI-generated ideas were straightforward and academic. “A lot of them sounded like college papers or peer-reviewed journal articles,” she said. “There’s a lot of colons, which is something I would do when I was in high school and I had to write an essay.” Shu found tools such as Descript useful. The linked transcripts and audio have gotten more accurate and made editing easier. 

All AI tools like these have to be trained to learn what is important to the user and, accordingly, these tools require a long-term commitment, Davis concluded.

Ufberg added that the program one may select might not last, as there are "still like 30 programs competing for every task right now.”