AI tools are helping employees take notes during meetings — and more.
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By Andy Medici – Senior Reporter, The Playbook, The Business Journals
Nov 3, 2025
Updated Nov 3, 2025 1:37pm EST
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Story Highlights
- 30% of workers use AI to skip meetings entirely.
- 60% of managers rely on AI for employee decisions.
- AI exposure correlates with decreased entry-level job demand.
The rapid spread of generative artificial-intelligence tools promises to revolutionize work. Gen Z is now using it to skip an element of office work: meetings.
A new study by Software Finder of 1,000 full-time workers found that 19% of workers are using AI tools to take notes during meetings, but 30% are using those same tools to skip meetings entirely — with the expectation that the AI tools will fill in the gaps. That number rises to 43% among Gen Z workers.
Those tools, however, come with drawbacks, according to those who use them. Among all respondents, 48% said the tools come with some inaccuracies and a loss of nuance, while 46% cited privacy concerns and 42% pointed to security risks, with respondents being able to choose more than one drawback.
When asked about the benefits, 69% said the tools save them time, allow them to take fewer manual notes and improve their record-keeping accuracy.
Most workers (87%) said their workload would increase if AI note-takers stopped working. The workers who use these AI tools the most work in the technology and software industries and are more like to be hybrid workers or fully remote workers, according to the survey.
More meetings for workers
The desire to replace meetings with a set of notes comes as office workers are flooded with meeting requests, emails and other message notifications and status updates.
The 2025 Work Trend Index Annual report by Microsoft, released in April, found that traditional office works are interrupted every two minutes, adding up to about 275 interruptions a day. About 60% of meetings are ad hoc versus scheduled, and work-related chats are spilling out of the usual workday and into after-work hours, with meetings after 8 p.m. up 16% over the last year.
A previous survey by Software Finder found that 72% of employees experienced “meeting fatigue” at work, with 46% saying their meetings were unnecessary or unproductive.
Employees end up wasting 146 hours in meetings every year, according to the survey. On average, an employee has five meetings a week.
AI changes office actions
Gen Z is not just using AI tools to skip meetings, though. Many also are leaning on AI tools for career advice. That’s what Southeastern Oklahoma State University found when it surveyed more than 1,000 workers about their use of generative AI tools. About 52% of the workers said they were considering a job or career change, and about one in three said they have used an AI tool like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to make a career decision.
By generation, Gen Z was most likely to be pondering a career change, at 57%, followed by millennials at 55% and Gen X at 50% — whereas just 12% of baby boomers said they were mulling a job or career change.
Managers also are increasingly using to AI tools. That includes using the technology to help them make decisions about the careers of those employees who report to them.
According to a Resume Builder survey of 1,342 managers, six in 10 managers said they rely on AI to make decisions about their direct reports. Of those users, 78% said they use AI tools to help determine raises, while 77% said they use AI tools to determine promotions. Additionally, 66% said they use AI to help determine layoffs, and 64% said they use the technology to help determine whom they fire.
The proliferation of AI tools in the last few years has put managers — and white-collar workers in general — on the hot seat. The term "white-collar recession" has gained traction in recent months as a number of companies, Amazon.com Inc. among them, have targeted middle managers for layoffs and the Trump administration has moved to cut consulting contracts and tens of thousands of federal jobs. The rise of generative AI only further threatens knowledge workers who once were thought to be relatively safe from automation.
Previous Indeed research found substantial overlap between the capabilities of existing generative AI tools and many of the skills and tasks listed in U.S. tech job postings — thus suggesting that automation of some of these tasks could result in fewer job postings. It also could be that AI is more of a long-term drag on job postings than a sudden shock, according to Indeed Hiring Lab economist Brendon Bernard.
A separate study of jobs over the past 18 months by Revelio Labs, in partnership with Bloomberg, found that while AI does not fully explain the decline observed in entry-level job demand, it does account for some of it. When the study controlled for industry and time trends, it found a 10% increase in AI exposure in a job is associated with an 11% drop in demand for entry-level roles — while accounting for a 7% increase in non-entry level roles. |
