A Call to End Meeting Transcript Summaries

March 18, 2026

AI continues to leak into every part of business, and for the most part, I can see some sort of value proposition for the various features and products. Vision models have provided improvements over traditional OCR techniques, agentic patterns have enabled automation of more mundane tasks, and chat interfaces have given users a seach product that can provide answers to their specific question. Sure, none of these solutions are perfect and have their fair share of errors. But overall, they have been an improvement.

Virtual (and hybrid) meetings have become the norm since COVID, however, meetings - at least in my experience - were typically not recorded and certainly didn't have transcription enabled. However, this changed as LLM's became mainstream. Microsoft, eager to offer another "free" product to your coroporate liscense, quickly integrated meeting transcription into Teams.

Now don't get me wrong, I think having the transcript is a good thing. If you are presenting or had to step away and see what your cat just knocked off the counter, the transcription allows you an opportunity to get caught up on what you missed or weren't able to take notes on. But that is where the benefit ends.

Sending a "summary", generated by yet another LLM call, is the biggest waste of time. They are verbose (nothing new with LLM's), are not accurate (since they don't detect any tone or true intent), and are written in the typical LLM prose (that I, and I think others, dislike).