Meetings are Ineffective 72% of the Time: Can AI Help, and If So, How Much?

There are over 100 million knowledge workers in the United States, and more than 1.25 billion knowledge workers globally, according to one Anatomy of Work estimate. And “work about work,” including unnecessary meetings, status checks and information searchers occupy as much as 60 percent of knowledge worker time. 

Hence the interest in AI agents that can conduct activities autonomously, presumably eliminating much of that “work about work.” Customer support, regulatory compliance, security and marketing are areas where agents are expected to contribute. 

Some of us might be more circumspect about AI’s ability to reduce the amount of “wasted” time in meetings.

According to a survey sponsored by Atlassian, respondents deem 72 percent of meetings “ineffective.” 

 Fully 78 percent of people surveyed say they’re expected to attend so many meetings, it’s hard to get their work done. Some 51 percent report they have to work overtime at least a few days a week due to meeting overload, and for those at the director level and up, that number rises to 67 percent.

Meanwhile, 76% agree they feel drained on days when they have a lot of meetings. 

And 80 percent of respondents say they’d be more productive if they spent less time in meetings.

Study Name	Date	Publisher	Key Conclusions
Stop the Meeting Madness	2017	Harvard Business Review	Executives spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. Wasteful meetings eat into essential solo work time 1.
State of Meetings	2019	Doodle	Pointless meetings cost U.S. businesses $399 billion a year 2.
Meeting Reduction Study	2022	Harvard Business Review	Employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%. Employee satisfaction increased by 52% 3.
Meeting Inflation Study	2022	Microsoft	People have 250% more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic3.
Meeting Recovery Study	2022	PMC (PubMed Central)	Ineffective meetings contribute to employee burnout. Meeting recovery time is needed to transition from meetings to the next task 4.
Virtual Meeting Fatigue Study	2022	Harvard Business Review	70% of meetings keep employees from doing productive work. The number of meetings attended by a worker rose by 13.5% during the pandemic 5.
Workplace Woes: Meetings	Not specified	Atlassian	72% of meetings are ineffective. 78% of people say they attend so many meetings it's hard to get work done 6.

There seem to be lots of reasons why meetings are so universally viewed as time wasters.And yet we keep doing it.

Some think AI will help, and it might, at the margin. My own view is that there are only three reasons to hold a meeting: to make a decision; to discuss an issue or to “build a team.”

“Sharing information” sometimes has been viewed on the third of the three reasons to hold a meeting, but all the other formats (email, social media, messaging, memos and reports) seem to have that covered. 

AI might help, a the margin, by taking notes that highlight decisions made and who is supposed to take the next steps to implement. Eventually, AI might force better thinking about the purpose and outcomes of a particular meeting.

But AI probably is not going to help much if the purpose of a meeting is something other than "making decisions" or "discussing an issue" that requires a decision. People hold meetings for all sorts of other reasons unrelated to outcomes, and AI probably doesn't help much with those sorts of drivers.