Protect Your Data in the Wild West of Bots with One AI Meeting Assistant

Virtual meetings are feeling a lot more crowded these days. You’re not alone if you’ve clicked into a meeting and were joined by multiple AI meeting assistant bots taking up the screen.

We’ve heard it referred to as the “Wild West of meeting bots” and it’s only becoming more commonplace as workers realize the benefits of using an AI meeting assistant.

We are firmly in the age of AI in the workplace. According to one report, 75% of knowledge workers are now using generative AI tools in their job. AI meeting assistants are a huge boon for productivity and efficient meetings — it’s a good thing that employees want to use them.

So if AI meeting assistant bots are here to stay, how do you wrangle them?

The problem extends beyond visual clutter. Ungoverned meeting bots pose a serious security risk. Anyone — from a seasonal intern to the CEO — can sign up for a free tool, invite it into meetings, and inadvertently expose sensitive company information. These bots record and store meeting data, raising major concerns for IT departments and leadership alike.

The solution, however, is simple. Companies should get ahead of the chaos by selecting, vetting, and approving a single AI meeting assistant for use across the organization. With one centralized, trusted tool, teams can enjoy the benefits of automated notes and recordings without compromising security.

Here, we’ll take a closer look at the advantages of adopting a single AI meeting assistant tool at your organization, boosting productivity and protecting your data.

5 reasons to adopt a single AI meeting assistant across the organization

We distilled the reasons why your organization should adopt a single AI meeting assistant into five key points.

1. Govern bots to protect security and privacy

The top reason to adopt a single org-wide AI meeting assistant is to protect your company’s security and privacy. That’s why you must ask very specific security questions when selecting an AI meeting assistant.

AI meeting assistants work by analyzing your raw meeting data to provide transcripts, summaries, action items, and other details. To do this, your data has to be sent to a large-language model (LLM) provider. This isn’t inherently unsafe — what can become an issue is if that data is in turn used to train the LLMs.

If an LLM is trained on your data, it creates the possibility that your private information could be repeated back to other clients. There’s also the issue of how long the LLMs hang onto your data, increasing the risk of exposure.

When an employee signs up for a free AI meeting assistant, it’s very likely that they’re not reading the finer details of the tool’s security measures. That puts your organization at risk if the meeting assistant they choose does not have the right security and compliance certifications. If your meetings deal with sensitive information that falls under HIPAA, that could even open you up to legal consequences.

Then, once a meeting is recorded, there’s risk again that the data — including the recording, transcript, and summary — could be shared outside the organization without your consent.

By evaluating and deploying one single AI meeting assistant across the organization, you can ensure that it:

• Doesn’t use your data to train LLMs
• Is SOC 2 compliant
• Is GDPR compliant
• Is HIPAA compliant if required
• Gives you control over data storage time
• Gives you control over what is recorded and who can see the recordings

Fellow, for example, meets all of the above criteria and is the most secure AI meeting assistant. Here’s more information on what security questions to ask when selecting an AI meeting assistant.

As well, Fellow allows meeting participants to pause and resume recording during a meeting, so if sensitive conversations happen they don’t have to be recorded. Even after a meeting is over, portions of the recording, transcript, and summary can be easily and permanently redacted.

AI meeting assistants can be used safely, but only if the time is taken to evaluate and select the right one. By approving a single tool, you can issue a company directive to ensure employees only use an approved AI meeting assistant and know they can’t simply invite their own.

2. Reduce the number of bots in your meetings

There’s no upside to having multiple AI meeting assistant bots attend your meetings.

Not only does it create unnecessary clutter in your video conferencing software, but it also creates confusion. Attendees won’t know who these bots belong to, where the recording is going to end up, and if they can trust any of those bots in the first place.

This becomes an even more dire situation in external calls with customers or other partners. With one bot, you can explain that your company has vetted and approved the tool and the recap can be shared with the third party. In the Wild West of bots, having too many bots in one call is just intimidating and unprofessional.

When your entire organization uses a single AI meeting assistant tool, only one bot needs to attend to record the call for everyone.

3. Benefit from a single company recording library

One of the biggest advantages of an AI meeting assistant is that it creates a centralized source of truth for all of your meeting recordings, meeting notes, summaries, and action items. If everyone is using a different AI note taker, that gets lost.

A single, unified meeting library means that employees can:

• Catch up on missed meetings after an absence
• Reference past meetings to prepare for future calls
• Share knowledge across teams with ease

That means, for example, Sales can share call recordings when they pass an account to Customer Success. Or Product managers can share a new feature demo with Marketing. This ability to share knowledge breaks down silos and helps teams work in sync.

A central library is also useful for coaching. Customer Success, Support, and Sales managers can create clips of wins and opportunities from calls to share with their team or direct reports. Plus, onboarding is made easier for HR leaders when new employees can review past meeting recordings, including company-wide announcements and Town Halls.

That recording library is a huge benefit for every team — but only if everyone is using the same AI meeting assistant.

4. Put controls in the hands of your IT team — not everyone

When everyone uses their own AI meeting assistant, they control all of its settings. Again, that’s a security risk.

With a single tool approved, your IT team can be the ones in charge of all settings and administrative controls.

For example, with Fellow, administrators can control:

• If meeting recaps can be shared outside the organization
• Invitations to the workspace
• Auto-deletion and how long data is stored for
• If meetings with particular teams, persons, or keywords will never be recorded
• Allowed integrations
• Meeting policies such as no meeting days
• And more

These are decisions that should be governed at a high level, which is only possible if everyone uses the same tool.

5. Save on costs

Finally, there’s a financial argument for approving only one AI meeting assistant.

There are two scenarios to consider. One is that individual employees are signing up for their own AI meeting assistants and expensing the cost. The other is that different teams are using and expensing their own tools. Either way, there’s a lack of budgetary consolidation.

A single org-wide AI meeting assistant gets everyone on the same plan, with the same features, and the ability to get the best deal with than an ad hoc-style system.

Take control of the Wild West of meeting bots

AI meeting assistants are here to stay. They have more than proved their usefulness for everything from productivity, to organization, to onboarding, to coaching. 

Don’t wait for your meetings to be taken over by bots to take action. Boost productivity while maintaining security by implementing a single AI meeting assistant you can trust.

Fellow is the AI meeting assistant with the most useful features and the most robust security standards. Get started with Fellow for free today.