The AI You Invited to the Meeting Never Clocks Out

I'm Sujin, 32, working at a company in Seoul. My team runs a lot of meetings — I'm in a conference room maybe ten times a week. Recently, though, my company started bringing an AI recording app into every meeting. It writes down who said what, summarizes everything, and even picks out the to-do items. At first I thought we'd just gained a very diligent new intern.

But this thing turns even our lunch debates into meeting minutes. Last week, our argument over "gukbap or pasta" showed up as agenda item number two. If someone sighs, it seems to file that away like it's a meaningful signal too. It's convenient to be able to ask afterward, "wait, what did I say back there?" — but when my mind wanders during a meeting, that same convenience feels a little chilling.

So I wanted to ask: how should I actually be using this AI recording app?

From Seoul, Sujin

Hi, Sujin!

Thanks for writing. Let me give you the short answer first: that thing may look like a recorder, but it's really no different from another attendee who just walked through the door. It listens, transcribes, summarizes, and eventually can even answer questions about what happened. What it can't do on its own, though, is pick up on the unspoken "okay, that's off the record now" that any human in the room would instantly understand.

On Earth, these AI apps sync with your calendar to join meetings, then pick up sound from your microphone and computer audio to generate text almost in real time. They'll dutifully transcribe meetings running up to six hours straight, turning long conversations into short summaries and to-do lists. The problem is that diligence and judgment aren't the same skill. Picture inviting the most hardworking intern in the world to every single meeting you have. That intern never clocks out, and just sits there quietly, waiting for someone to tell it whether this was small talk or an actual decision.

That's why the order of operations matters. Consent has to come before recording. Everyone in the room needs to know and agree, and depending on where you are, getting consent from every participant is actually required by law. A simple "we're recording this now" is far safer than relying on some tiny blinking light in the corner.

You should also check where the recording actually goes. Some tools send audio off to the cloud for processing; others handle transcription and summarizing entirely on your laptop. The on-device option is a bit less convenient, but it means sensitive conversations don't travel far. You can also decide ahead of time when the original audio and transcript get deleted once the meeting's over.

Where I'm from, we used to hold confidential meetings inside a refrigerator. A bit cold, sure, but refrigerators don't send out summary emails. You earthlings don't need to go that far — just check where the data's stored and how it gets deleted.

You shouldn't trust the summary too much, either. There's no guarantee that what the AI flags as "important" matches what actually matters to you, and when several people are talking, it can mix up who said what. So think of the meeting notes as a draft, not a replacement for memory. Decisions and who's responsible for them are worth a human double-check. One name attached to the wrong task can turn into a very confident-sounding assignment next week, and a joke or objection stripped of context can end up reading as the exact opposite of what was meant.

For in-person meetings, a dedicated recorder or a small standalone mic can be handy too — it frees up your phone for other things and picks up distant voices better. That said, in WIRED's own testing, accuracy, speaker separation, and storage methods varied a lot from product to product, and a monthly subscription fee often lurked behind the hardware price. Things on Earth tend to make you pay at the register twice.

And these tools don't just take dictation anymore. They trim the filler, polish your thinking, and try to draft messages and schedule items too. To do that, they ask for more than just microphone access — they want permission to look at your screen or other apps as well. The more convenient it gets, the bigger the print on the consent form needs to be. What it's listening to, where that data goes, how long it's kept, and who can look at it again — if any of those four things are fuzzy, the AI app stops being a colleague and starts being an open window.

So don't set it to auto-join every meeting — invite it only when you actually need it. Turn it off for sensitive conversations, have a person review the summaries, and keep the retention period short. Even the most diligent new hire needs a badge and a clock-out time.

So here's my answer to your question, Sujin. That thing is both a recorder and a participant. And it wasn't your calendar that invited it — it was the earthling who switched on auto-invite in that calendar. The culprit is always sitting in the settings screen.

From the alien who got to Earth first and has been living here ever since

P.S. Turn off the recording before your next lunch meeting. Otherwise, gukbap might suddenly get promoted to a quarterly goal.

P.P.S. Tell it to delete the sighs. Back on my home planet, someone kept sighs on file for three years, and it caused a real mess.