How We Feed the Meeting Factory
How calendars became factories of waste
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI won’t undo your chaotic calendar. If your schedule is already broken, it will simply expose the cracks that were already there. A CFO once asked me a question I’ll never forget: “If AI gives me three extra hours a day, what do I fill them with?” The room went silent. Everyone knew the answer. In most organizations, those hours vanish, swallowed by more meetings, more reports, more dashboards, and more noise. The problem is how we spend saved time, endlessly recycling the illusion of productivity.
The Real Problem
Corporate calendars started with good intentions.
Monday status.
Tuesday pipeline.
Wednesday sync.
Thursday strategy.
Friday retro.
Each one made sense at some point in the past, but over the years, they piled up, layer after layer, until the week turned into a factory that produces meetings simply to justify its own existence. Factories are meant to create value. Most meetings don’t. When I ask leaders, “What decisions came out of your last three meetings?” the answers are often vague. A discussion. An update. A review. Rarely a decision. Rarely progress. The factory hums, but nothing meaningful comes off the line.
Research backs this up. The London School of Economics found that over a third of business meetings are unproductive, costing U.S. organizations roughly $259 billion a year in wasted time. Another study from Reclaim AI estimates that workers spend 37% of their week in meetings or coordinating them, at an average cost of $29,000 per employee per year. Think about that for a moment. If time is money, most organizations are setting cash on fire every week under the guise of “collaboration.”
What AI Reveals
Used insightfully, AI can reveal redundancies in your day-to-day activities. Status updates can now be compiled from email, chats, and project tools in minutes. Summaries can be generated before people even leave the room. Background research that used to take a junior analyst a full day can now be prepared in advance with a few prompts.
Once AI handles those tasks, the real purpose of many meetings becomes uncomfortably clear: too often, there wasn’t one. The meeting existed not to drive action but to simulate it. Think of AI as a lens that exposes which meetings have bones worth keeping and which are just empty structures held together by habit.
Harvard Business Review recently described three roles AI can play to make meetings more valuable. It can “set the table” by organizing context and data before the meeting, act as “one seat at the table” by tracking notes and commitments during it, and “recap and follow up” afterward by sending summaries and next steps. But if you follow this logic, you’ll see the real revelation: when AI does all that, many meetings simply don’t need to happen at all.
The Hidden Cost You Can Feel
The most expensive resource in any organization isn’t software or capital; it’s focused human attention. A one-hour meeting with ten people doesn’t cost one hour. It costs ten. Multiply that across teams and quarters, and the meeting factory quietly consumes entire workweeks without delivering real progress. The cost isn’t just measured in time, but in lost momentum that compounds throughout the day. Every unnecessary meeting interrupts flow, delays decisions, and forces people to switch contexts. By the time a decision is finally made, the energy to act has often evaporated.
One recent survey of professionals using AI copilots found that 37% reported attending fewer meetings after integrating AI into their workflow. It’s a small but important data point, proof that AI doesn’t just make meetings faster but helps remove the need for many of them altogether. Imagine reclaiming even five percent of your week. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, that’s roughly 2.2 hours per week, or 100 hours a year, regained through smart AI use. What could your team build with that kind of time?
One simple fix can make a surprising difference: normalize 15-minute meetings as the default, rather than 60 minutes. Those shorter blocks encourage precision, focus, and urgency, while AI handles the administrative debris. Come to meetings prepared to make decisions, rather than defaulting to getting yet another status update.
From Updates to Decisions
The real question isn’t “How do we use AI in meetings?” but “What are meetings actually for?” The answer should be obvious: decisions. Everything else, such as updates, summaries, and background reading, belongs in asynchronous workflows supported by AI. The live meeting should be reserved for the moments that require judgment, trade-offs, and alignment among humans.
Try this swap: replace weekly updates with AI-generated briefs delivered the day before. Use the freed time for a decision forum with three rules.
Bring only stuck decisions.
Surface one bet to test.
Retire one risk or ritual that no longer serves.
If there are no decisions to be made, cancel the meeting and return the time. You’ll be amazed at how quickly people adapt when they realize the calendar isn’t a fixed law of nature.
A Two-Week Experiment
If you want proof, run a two-week pilot with one team. Start by auditing recurring meetings. List everything that repeats and note the purpose, owner, and cost in people hours. Then convert all updates into AI briefs and let technology handle the preparation and the summary. Keep briefs to one page and redesign each agenda with only three items: a stuck decision, a bet to test, and a risk or ritual to retire. End each meeting with clear commitments, closing with the question “Who owns what by when?” The first week will feel odd. People will miss the comfort of ritual. By the second week, the energy changes. The team realizes meetings no longer consume them; they serve them.
Why Leaders Resist
If this sounds so simple, why don’t more leaders do it? Because meetings are a performance of control. It feels safer to see your team talking through work than to trust that the work will happen. Managers often feel useful when they convene a group, even if the outcome is marginal. But safety isn’t the same as progress. The hardest part of dismantling the meeting factory is admitting that much of what filled our calendars was structure without substance. AI just makes that truth harder to ignore.
What Leaders Can Do in 30 Days
You don’t need a transformation office to make a visible difference. Start with three moves. First, kill one recurring meeting and replace it with an AI-compiled pre-read and a 30-minute decision forum. Second, change the scoreboard. Don’t measure the number of meetings held; measure the number of decisions made and shipped. Third, publish commitments after every meeting on a one-page document outlining decisions, owners, and timelines. These small steps send a powerful message. Meetings exist to create movement, not to preserve ritual.
What Individuals Can Do Without Permission
Even if your organization resists change, you can still run your own experiment. Decline one meeting this week and ask for an AI-generated summary instead. Offer to send a one-page decision brief in place of an update. Close every meeting you lead with a written list of commitments. These quiet experiments create visible wins, and once people see that it works, they start to follow. That’s how cultural change begins, one decision, one calendar block at a time.
Prompts That Transform Meetings
Save these and use them.
Decision Brief: “Summarize the last 14 days of [project] across email, docs, and tickets. Create one page with three sections: 1) decisions made, 2) decisions pending with options, 3) risks retired or added.”
Meeting Minimizer: “From the notes and calendar for [team], list every recurring meeting. Suggest which could become async updates with AI-generated briefs. For each live meeting that remains, propose a 30-minute decision agenda.”
Commitment Tracker: “Review this week’s meeting notes. Extract every decision, owner, and due date. Create a weekly scoreboard showing which are complete, overdue, or at risk.” These prompts do more than save time; they change behavior.
The Cultural Payoff
The biggest surprise in redesigning meetings isn’t efficiency; it’s morale. When people see their time respected, they lean in. When meetings are streamlined and decisions are made quickly, teams feel a sense of momentum. When rituals disappear, confidence rises because people see themselves driving impact instead of just attending another room full of talk. AI doesn’t create that culture; it simply removes the excuses that kept it from emerging.
My Lesson From Burnout
Early in my career, I equated a full calendar with importance. A packed week felt like proof that I mattered. It wasn’t. I wasn’t essential; I was exhausted. The most valuable work I’ve ever done didn’t happen in a meeting. It happened in long, uninterrupted stretches of focus where decisions were made and others could finally move forward. AI has reinforced that lesson. Use it to clear the clutter, then use the space to think, choose, and build.
Quick Proof Points
A one-hour meeting with ten people equals ten hours of lost productivity. Stack a few of those each week and you’ve burned entire workdays on ritual.
AI can pull status updates in minutes from tools your team already uses. If the update takes less time than sending the invite, skip the meeting.
Weekly standing meetings stacked across departments compound into entire workweeks lost every month.
Your 30-Day Checklist
Eliminate one recurring meeting and replace it with a pre-read and decision forum.
Start measuring decisions shipped per week.
Publish commitments after every live meeting.
Default to 15-minute blocks, extending only if you can name the decision to be reached.
Protect one focus block each day to move a single decision to completion.
Closing Reflection
The meeting factory is a quiet killer. It consumes time, energy, and attention while producing little real movement. AI is the lens that makes the waste visible. The opportunity in using AI isn’t to take better notes in more meetings. Instead, use it to help you eliminate the ones that never needed to exist. If AI gave you three hours tomorrow, don’t spend them in another status call. Give your team the space to think, decide, and act. The future belongs to leaders who choose movement over ritual.
Onward,
Yen Anderson