One of the most meme-able Zoom meeting moments happened three and a half years ago, when lawyer Rod Ponton was unable to turn off the cat filter on Zoom during a civil forfeiture hearing, and he uttered the meme-able phrase, “I’m here live. I’m not a cat.”
That incident took place at what was still a relatively fluid time in establishing professional codes of conduct for hybrid and remote meetings. Camera on or camera off? Pets and children in frame or no? Pajamas because nobody is seeing you anyway, or dress like you're still in an office even if nobody is seeing you anyway?
There is actually support for dressing for the office even when you're working from home; a Wall Street Journal article explained:
The rise of video calls has added complexity to an area of research known as “enclothed cognition,” or what signals clothes send to the brain, says Dr. Adam Galinsky, co-author of the pre-pandemic research that coined the term. “In some ways, the clothes that you wear might have an even bigger impact because we can often see ourselves and what we’re wearing and that sort of draws that symbolic value [attached] to it even closer to our consciousness,” he says.
The article went on to quote other researchers who pointed out that having clearly designated work outfits could help boost productivity:
Vanessa Bohns, associate professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University’s ILR School … recommends changing into clothing associated with work at the beginning of the day to cue a sense of being in serious work mode: “You feel physically different, and the clothes feel different so that tells your body, which also tells your mind, that this is work time.”
So there's a human behavior element to how well we do in virtual meetings -- and it starts with us making sure we've set ourselves up to take our work seriously.
Now that we've worked out the professional norms for video meetings and hybrid workplaces (business clothes, yes; pets making cameo appearances during meetings, also yes), along comes a new technological wrinkle: AI avatars.
AI video generation platform HeyGen has announced technology to let users to produce AI avatars that can attend Zoom meetings for them. The technology itself was foreshadowed four months ago by Zoom Founder and CEO Eric Yuan’s mentioning “digital twins” who could attend meetings in lieu of human users. Now, HeyGen is positioning the AI avatars as doing your most tedious work for you:
Our latest update lets your AI avatar join one or multiple Zoom meetings simultaneously, 24/7. Your avatar won’t just look and sound like you, it’ll think, talk, and make decisions, just like you. Armed with whatever knowledge or persona you give them, the Interactive Avatar is perfect for online coaching, customer support, sales calls, interviews, and more. It can take on repetitive meetings with ease, freeing you up for what really matters.”
Let's leave questions like "But aren't meetings an effective way for people to successfully transmit information and brainstorm together?" for another time. Here's what I'm interested in learning more about: exactly how professional will my AI avatars be? Will these avatars be smart enough to recognize that the levels of formality change depending on the type of meeting?
But more importantly -- if my AI avatar is going to be used for interactions where agility, contextual awareness and a human touch go a long way, like a meeting where I'm coaching a hire on editorial skills or a job interview where someone is eagerly sharing their love of establishing editorial processes, will it be able to provide the other party with the same level of feeling seen, heard and informed as I can? Or is replacing me with an avatar going to devalue the entire interaction, to the detriment of my job or my organization?
To return to the lawyer who had to assert that he was not, in fact, a cat: He still showed up to do his job -- and he even used the moment of virtual felinity as a way to humanize the technological glitch: "If I can make the country chuckle for a moment in these difficult times they’re going through, I’m happy to let them do that at my expense.”
One wonders if our impending AI avatars will bring that much levity to the meetings we're all skipping now.