A meeting a day keeps the robots away

It is not often that someone makes a prediction that strikes you as profoundly incorrect yet also quite useful.

But so it was when Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman told the FT that “white-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months”.

It is not clear whether he meant that AI would actually have swept away all this work in 12 to 18 months, or just that it would be capable of doing so. Either way, bold predictions like these reveal an underappreciation of what other people’s jobs actually entail. Tech leaders are particularly susceptible to this error but, to an extent, we all do it, which is why people often say in surveys that AI will probably replace a lot of jobs but not theirs.

The truth is that most white-collar professional roles do not just involve “sitting down at a computer”, from lawyers attending court hearings to project managers going on site visits. Then there are the meetings (internal and external). A recent study of Norwegian workers found that meetings consumed an average of 12 per cent of work hours and 14 per cent of company wage bills.

There will be those who say that most meetings are just performative busywork, but if that is the case, it is strange that the most successful companies seem to do more of them. The authors of the Norwegian study found that planning, problem solving, information sharing and project co-ordination accounted for most meeting activity, that high-paying and high-revenue firms devoted more resources to meetings, and that meeting frequency and intensity were positively related to worker wage growth. They concluded that meetings were like broccoli: “widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway”.

It is not obvious that AI agents could eliminate the need for this type of work, since it involves persuasion, contestation and the exchange of tacit knowledge and experience that is spread across different departments, and often exists inside people’s heads rather than in a neatly codified handbook on the intranet.

Indeed, AI’s ability to supercharge some forms of output could generate the need for more co-ordination and decision-making work. I have written before about the case of software development, where those with “glue” skills to co-ordinate AI agents and see the wood for the trees are now in higher demand. In the same vein, an analysis by PwC of 1bn job adverts from six continents found that employers of AI-exposed entry-level roles were increasingly looking for skills such as management, strategy and teamwork, combined with an increased demand for face-to-face presence.

Let’s hope this does not mean that the future white-collar professional will just sit in back-to-back meetings arguing about what AI has produced. I suspect there will still be a need for human experts to do computer-based work. But to the extent that we see ourselves as in competition with AI, then the best strategy is surely to add some value to one’s computer-based work that large language models cannot. We, after all, can step away from our screens, enter the embodied world, form and sustain relationships, and find out information that does not exist on the internet.

That will require us to unlearn some habits we developed in recent decades in the name of “getting more done”. The phone call that saved the need to meet. The email that saved the need to call. The Slack message that saved the need to email.

I am perhaps predisposed to this advice because my own role has always rewarded stepping away from the computer. Since time immemorial, editors have admonished reporters: “If you’re sitting at your desk all day, you’re not doing your job properly.” But to some extent, the same is true of many professional jobs, and will become more so over time.

Which brings us back to Suleyman’s prediction. I tend to take a dim view of AI “exposure” scores, but as a personal rule of thumb, “what proportion of the day did I spend glued to my computer?” is probably a useful metric to keep an eye on.

So steer away from employers who conflate “bums on seats” with productivity (especially if they monitor desk occupancy, mouse movements and keystrokes). Swap the Pret sandwich at your laptop for a meal with a contact or colleague. And stop resenting all the meetings you have — they might just be keeping the robots at bay.

sarah.oconnor@ft.com