6 Ways Cognitive Collaboration Can Improve Meetings

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By combining artificial intelligence with business knowledge, cognitive collaboration can make meetings easier by improving productivity and user experience. It can identify meeting participants and give everyone relevant background information on each person in the meeting, before the meeting even starts. Meeting participants will also be able to easily access any documents, video streams or project tools as needed. Cognitive collaboration even employs facial recognition so that you’ll always know the name of the person who’s talking, even if you’ve never met before.

Here are some of the key benefits cognitive collaboration can bring to the conference table:

1.People insights with detailed profile information

What if you could skip the roundtable introductions at the start of every meeting, because everything you needed to know about everyone present could be found inside the meeting app? And not just a few details from someone’s (infrequently updated) LinkedIn profile, but relevant information like job title, location, work history, reporting structure and any appearances in publications or blogs, updated in real time? Cognitive collaboration can do that.

2.Intelligent virtual assistants

“Hey Alexa, start my meeting!” By now, many of us are familiar with Siri, Alexa or the Google Assistant. The same technology that powers smart homes is now making its way into meeting rooms. Zoom Meetings has announced integrations with Alexa and also delivers the same experience through its own meeting assistant. Cisco WebEx has the same technology with WebEx Assistant, which allows you to begin your meetings with voice commands. In fact, a Cisco survey found that 57 percent of respondents thought their teams would be more productive with a virtual assistant.

Within 3 years, a virtual assistant for your meetings will no longer be a nice to have; it will be table stakes for any enterprise collaboration platform. Not only will the assistant start your meeting, it would be able to take meeting notes, summarize them and share with everyone invited to the meeting.

3.Machine learning and bot integrations

Communication and collaboration have gone beyond human to human interaction to interaction with business processes. There are lots of software applications that help our companies drive business process like IT Support, Incident Reporting and Management, Customer Interaction and Sales and Lead Management, to name a few. These applications by themselves could provide us with the insight we need to make intelligent business decisions, but what if we could request more detailed insights from these applications in a conversational manner?

For instance, let’s say a sales manager needs to access a performance report before the meeting. A simple conversation with a sales bot (who we’ve named Frankie) could look like this:

Sales Manager– Hey Frankie, can you please get me a performance report for my sales account executives?

Frankie– Sure, do you want this in excel or PDF?

Sales Manager– Excel format please

Frankie– OK, here you go *report generated and attached*

These interfaces can also use AI to streamline meetings. A conversational interface allows you to do anything from starting a meeting to capturing action items or even pull up other applications, like project management software, during a meeting.

4.Facial recognition and virtual name tags

Ensure that everyone can see, hear and know everyone else in a meeting by matching their name to their relevant professional details. For videoconferences, cognitive collaboration can detect who’s talking and frame them on the screen, making it easier for coworkers to join the meeting from wherever they may be working.

5.Noise detection and suppression

Turn down the volume on annoying distractions like keyboards, shuffling paper, all the way through to dogs barking or emergency sirens outside. This helps ensure that meeting participants can focus on what is most important during meetings without extensive and disruptive distractions from unwanted noise sources.

6.Dynamic document sharing

The beauty of modern-day collaboration is the ability to meet anywhere, on any device and at any time. This has also been extended to sharing content from anywhere and any device. Long gone are the days where we had to clog our inbox with project review documents. We are all familiar with document titles such as “Dam Renovation Project Review-v1”, “Dam Renovation Project Review-v2” up until “Dam Renovation Project Review-vn,” (where n is the number of revisions carried out on the initial documents). Dynamic content sharing brings in the power of true collaboration that allows multiple parties to make edits to a document without leaving the collaboration tool and also have it stored in any cloud drive platform of their choice.

Whether you are seated in the meeting room, joining from the road from any of your personal devices, you are not excluded from viewing shared content on screen between attendees. Meeting applications also give us the ability to share ideas on any screen of any device with other meeting participants, whiteboard and make annotations on the shared content to help us further illustrate our points.

How cognitive collaboration creates cost savings

Businesses expect that any videoconferencing solution would allow them to reduce costs associated with travel, as meeting attendees no longer need to be in the same room. According to Nemertes Research, cognitive collaboration can offer a variety of additional cost savings:

  • Shortening project lifecycles to reduce resource requirements and time to complete tasks
  • Improvements in meeting space utilization; avoid over-constructing meeting space or adding additional meeting spaces
  • Improving employee engagement, especially for remote workers, which can reduce turnover and training costs
  • Reduced real-estate costs by better supporting remote workers

At CDW, we take a user-centric approach to collaboration. From one remote worker to 10,000, we can design a seamless, customized solution that puts collaboration to work, driving real results while helping you meet your goals. Learn more about our enterprise collaboration solutions.