Your AI Notetaker Would Like a Word

The modern meeting has acquired a new participant. It doesn’t contribute, laugh at jokes or pretend to understand the quarterly strategy. It simply joins with a name like “John’s AI Notetaker,” records every syllable and later produces a summary in which John apparently agreed to lead six projects by Friday. Nobody remembers inviting it. Nobody knows how to make it leave. Yet there it sits, the corporate equivalent of a raccoon that has figured out the conference-room door.

AI notetakers have spread across Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and other workplace platforms because they appeared to solve a genuine problem. People would rather participate in a conversation than spend 45 minutes typing minutes nobody will read. The artificial intelligence tools can transcribe meetings, identify speakers, summarize decisions and extract follow-up tasks. Otter markets its meeting agent as something close to an executive assistant that never takes a day off. Zoom’s AI Companion can join meetings on competing platforms and provide transcripts and summaries afterward.

The arrangement looked manageable when the notetaker appeared on the participant list. Someone could see the bot, ask whether everyone consented or toss it into the virtual parking lot.

Now the bot has escaped the screen.

Portable AI recorders can attach to a phone, sit on a conference table or hide in a pocket. They can record conversations offline, then upload the audio later for transcription and analysis. That means a company can block an AI bot from Teams, restrict software installations and ban public AI services on corporate laptops while an employee’s personal recorder captures the entire conversation from three feet away.

As attorneys Gregory C. Brown Jr. and Paul Y. Yim explain in a new Jackson Lewis analysis, portable notetakers turn a productivity convenience into a sprawling workplace risk. The device doesn’t need the company’s network, software or permission. It only needs to be within earshot.

The resulting headaches fall into four broad categories:

Consent becomes complicated. Federal law generally permits recording when one party consents, according to the Justice Department’s explanation of consensual monitoring. Some states require consent from everyone. Add colleagues calling from multiple states or countries and the humble weekly check-in begins to resemble a law school exam. Consent to recording also may not equal consent to send voices and statements to an outside AI provider for transcription, speaker identification and storage.

The recorder hears too much. Human notes usually capture decisions. Artificial intelligence captures the conversational sausage factory. That can include speculative comments, abandoned ideas, medical information, customer data, workplace complaints, trade secrets and the five-minute digression about someone’s mother-in-law. A summary can then turn those loose remarks into a tidy, searchable record with bullet points and misplaced confidence.

Corporate controls lose their reach. Security teams can approve software and block websites. A pocket recorder operating through a personal account lives beyond those controls. Jackson Lewis classifies that as “shadow AI,” the use of technology without organizational approval or oversight. The company may not know what was collected, where it went, who can access it or when it will be deleted.

The vendor joins the meeting, even when its bot doesn’t. Recordings can produce audio files, transcripts, summaries, prompts, speaker labels and voice data. Each creates another record to protect. Otter’s privacy policy, for example, tells users that uploaded recordings may contain other people’s personal information and instructs them to secure the necessary permissions. The person who clicked “record” therefore carries responsibilities that may extend well beyond remembering who volunteered for the PowerPoint.

The answer isn’t to send every notetaker to the same farm where companies retired the fax machine. These products offer real value, particularly for employees with accessibility needs, people managing packed calendars and teams trying to turn conversation into action.

Companies do need rules built around what the technology does instead of which logo appears on it. Jackson Lewis recommends recording policies that cover personal devices, express consent and conversations that remain off-limits. Employers also need an approval process for specific tools and uses, vendor reviews, retention standards and training for managers.

Those policies require care. Employers can’t casually impose restrictions that interfere with workers’ rights to act together over workplace conditions. The National Labor Relations Board says employees have protected rights to discuss pay, benefits and other employment issues. Even the “no recording” policy needs a legal review before somebody laminates it.

AI notetakers promised to help us remember what happened in meetings. Their latest contribution may be reminding everyone to look around the room before saying anything memorable.