Setting up meetings is a part of everyday life. Whether it’s setting up meetings with coworkers, catching up with an old friend over coffee, or hanging out with your friends, we are meeting people on a daily basis.
The problem is, people don’t realize how much time is spent not only setting up a meeting, but also preparing for one. The back and forth communication over availability and settling on a good place to meet all take way too much time. If you’ve never met the person you have to set up a meeting with, you have no idea what their preferences are on location, whether they like to eat at an upscale location far away, or if they’re good with a decent restaurant around the corner.
To solve these issues, some have taken the liberty to use Artificial Intelligence to take care of the job for you. Not only are they setting up meetings for you without the back and forth communication, but they’re also helping you be more prepared for a meeting with a person you’ve never met. Check out these four startups who are using data from artificial intelligence to help you schedule meetings:
X.ai is a personal assistant that helps set up your meetings. It sets you up with “Amy”, their AI bot. All you have to do it send one email, CC Amy to your recipient, and tell your recipient that Amy will take care of your work. From your end, you send just one email. After that, Amy does the back and forth communication for you. Because she knows your calendar, she sends the back and forth emails for you, and you simply get a confirmation email at the end of it, saying you have a meeting booked for a specific time. To sign up, you must get on to their waitlist until they give you access.
Kono is a mobile application that schedules your events in 3 steps. What makes them unique is that you can set up a meeting on their application without ever typing a single word. All you need to do is select what event you want lunch, meeting, hang out) and select your invite list. Kono cross checks everyone’s calendars, and gives you the best time to meet. It also gives you the best location to meet based. It’s AI engine checks where you and your guests like to eat. As you use the app more, the recommendations become more accurate because it learns more about you as you use it.
Charlie is a personal assistant that helps you learn more about the people you’re going to meet. Instead of wasting time stalking the person on LinkedIn, Google, and Twitter, the application highlights what important things have gone on in that person’s life. Charlie wants you to stand out from everyone else when you have to close that deal because you knew crucial information about the investor that none of the other interviewees knew. Their goal is to eliminate the hassle that is two minutes before your meeting and you have no idea who the person is you’re meeting.
Using Artificial Intelligence, it’ll pick out exactly what you need to know in a nice summary.
Artificial Intelligence is set to revolutionize the way we set up meetings. No longer will we have to set up meetings by sending multiple emails and messages back and forth, figuring out a good time to meet, a good place to meet, and working with last minute cancellations. When it’s actually time for our meeting, they’ll tell us everything we need to know to make the meeting great. It seems that, in the near future, we will be able to have virtual assistants who take care of the work for us, leaving us more time to actually make the meeting great.
Image Credit: Flickr/photosteve101