If AI Can Do It, It Probably Shouldn't Have Been a Meeting

AI is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with the organisational habits that mistook activity for achievement and attendance for contribution

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Article link: https://open.substack.com/pub/johanosteyn/p/if-ai-can-do-it-it-probably-shouldnt?r=73gqa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

I have spent considerable time inside organisations observing how people work, and one pattern has always struck me: the meeting as a measure of importance. The fuller the calendar, the more indispensable the person appears. But artificial intelligence is now doing something quietly disruptive to that arrangement. It is absorbing the coordination, summarisation, and status-reporting work that justified so many of those meetings — and in doing so, it is holding up a mirror to decades of corporate theatre. What organisations choose to do with that reflection will say a great deal about their willingness to be honest about how they actually spent their people’s time.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

The data on meetings has long been uncomfortable. A Harvard Business Review survey of 182 senior managers found that 65% said meetings prevent them from completing their own work, and 71% described them as unproductive and inefficient: Executives were spending an average of 23 hours per week in meetings — more than double the figure recorded in the 1960s — while research estimates that unproductive meetings cost businesses in the United States alone upwards of $37 billion every year.

Companies like Shopify made headlines for deliberately cancelling recurring meetings and blocking calendar time to restore focus and drive genuine output. And yet meetings persisted as the dominant feature of corporate life — not because they were working, but because, as Fortune reported in early 2026, they had become a status symbol, a way of signalling importance in organisations where the collective mission and individual goals were unclear.

AI did not create this problem. But it is exposing it with uncomfortable precision. As Fast Company observed, for decades the corporate world sustained itself on rituals — long and useless meetings, excessive documentation, convoluted chains of approval, and performative busyness that drove up headcount and slowed down progress without delivering any appreciable improvement in outcomes. AI is now automating the symbolic layer of that work: drafting updates, summarising discussions, tracking action items, writing status reports, and transcribing the content of conversations that arguably did not need to happen in the first place.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

The Deloitte 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report found that two-thirds of organisations are already reporting productivity and efficiency gains from AI adoption, with agentic AI being deployed to automatically capture meeting actions, draft follow-up communications, and track commitments made in video conferences. That is significant. When an AI agent can attend your meeting, produce a summary, extract the decisions, and distribute the actions in seconds, the question that follows is unavoidable: What was the meeting actually for?

In many cases, the honest answer is coordination that could have been an email, status-sharing that could have been a dashboard, and decision-making that never actually happened in the room. Research by Grammarly found that knowledge workers admit to spending roughly 21% of their working week on performative or unproductive tasks, and that 86% of workers say AI helps them reduce that performative layer. That is a striking admission — not that work was hard, but that a significant portion of it was never genuinely productive in the first place.

I have written previously about how AI is unbundling middle management, separating the mechanical coordination layer from the genuinely human work of judgment, coaching, and accountable decision-making. The meeting crisis is a direct extension of that argument. When AI removes the need for a human to compile and present a status update, it does not just save time. It raises the question of why we built entire layers of organisational hierarchy around that activity. TechRadar makes the point well: AI is opening the door to a different kind of productivity — not doing more of the same things faster, but doing better, bigger, and more genuinely valuable things with the time that is recovered.

IMPLICATIONS

For business leaders, the temptation will be to treat this as a scheduling problem. Remove a few meetings from the calendar, install an AI transcription tool, and declare victory. That response entirely misses the point. The deeper question is whether your organisation has confused busyness with value for so long that it no longer knows the difference. If your people cannot articulate what a meeting produced, whom it served, or what decision it enabled, then the AI summary of that meeting will simply be a more efficient record of something that should not have happened at all.

The organisations that will genuinely benefit from this moment are those willing to redesign rather than just reduce. That means defining what human time is actually for, building cultures where outcome matters more than attendance, and creating new norms of communication that do not default to a calendar invite whenever coordination is needed. It also means having honest conversations with people whose roles were substantially built around meeting attendance and information relay — because when AI makes that work redundant, the human value proposition has to be rebuilt around something more durable.

For employees, particularly those early in their careers, this is both a warning and an opportunity. The instinct to fill the calendar and stay visible through volume of activity will become increasingly counterproductive. What AI cannot replicate is genuine judgment, creative problem-solving, and the ability to lead people through ambiguity. Those who invest in those capabilities now will find their value rising as the performative layer of work falls away.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

Artificial intelligence is not dismantling the corporate meeting out of malice. It is simply doing what good tools do — taking over the work that did not require human intelligence in the first place. The reckoning that follows is not about technology. It is about honesty. Organisations that built their cultures around visibility, attendance, and the theatre of coordination now have a choice: face the truth that AI is surfacing, and redesign work around genuine human contribution, or install AI tools on top of the same broken habits and call it transformation. One path leads to organisations that are genuinely more effective. The other leads to AI-generated summaries of meetings that still should never have happened.

Author Bio: Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He served as a working group member contributing recommendations toward South Africa’s national AI strategy, an initiative by the National Advisory Council on Innovation, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the Human Sciences Research Council, and the Department of Science and Innovation. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net