New Zoom Research: How will AI, AR, and VR Impact Meetings?

A few months ago we sent a survey to a wide swath of Zoom users to see how they think meetings will change with the rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence), AR (Augmented Reality), and VR (Virtual Reality). We received over 1000+ responses and wanted to share the results to give you a peek into what your future meetings could look like.

To start, the results indicated that most workers spent a significant part of their work week in meetings. On average it’s 8.8 hours. If you’re a director level and above it goes up to an average of 10.4 hours a week. This means any improvements to how you meet could result in major potential productivity gains. Those improvements could come from technology, adopting best practices like an agenda, or just saying “No” to lower-value meetings.

In the study we wanted to understand what tasks associated with meetings were workers most excited to have taken over by technology. Note taking, scheduling, and transcription came out on top. All these are low-value and time-consuming tasks that are only now beginning to be handled by technology. Workers are eager to offload these jobs to machines and free up employees to work on other more important and interesting tasks.

Over sixty-five percent (65.92%) of those surveyed think AI will save them at least an hour a week of busy work, with many thinking it will save them one to five hours a week. That percentage goes up to a whopping 78.8% for heavy meeting users (more than 10 hours a week). That’s between 4 and 20 hours a month you could potentially get back as we see these technologies implemented.

73% of people surveyed believed AI would have a positive impact on their physical and virtual meetings. It was lower for AR at 67% and only 53% for VR. As we dug into the results, the AI applications for some of the most taxing tasks associated with meetings are relatively clear. Most respondents had a much harder time imagining the applications for AR and VR. We hypothesize consumer technologies like Alexa and Siri have made AI a little more tangible for the average professional.

It was clear from the survey that remote workers and IT professionals are on the more optimistic side regarding the impact of these technologies and will likely be some of the most vocal early adopters. Eighty percent (80%) of IT and remote workers think the impact will be positive. This makes sense intuitively, since IT professionals are close to the technology and can see areas for improvement. For remote workers, they rely so heavily on virtual meetings to communicate that they are also eager for these technologies to make it easier and more immersive for people who are not physically present. Thank you to all our survey participants. We appreciate your insights and are working hard to continue to implement some of these exciting technologies into our platform. If you’d like to learn more about how Zoom is bringing the cutting edge of technology to video communications, sign up for a personalized one-to-one demo with a Zoom product specialist today! ** Survey ran Dec 12-15, 2017, with 1063 completed responses. No sub segment was reported above that had fewer than 100 responses.