Bill Gates Shares His Favorite AI Tool for Managing Meetings

Meetings can often feel like they multiply unexpectedly, taking up large chunks of the workday. This is especially true for Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, co-founder, and former CEO of Microsoft, who has a packed schedule filled with high-stakes meetings.

These gatherings, whether in-person or virtual, are crucial to his ongoing work in public health and artificial intelligence.

According to Chris Williams, a former Vice President of HR at Microsoft who worked closely with Gates for eight years, Gates is deeply involved in every meeting, digging into the details and asking probing questions. "He was always curious, always wanted to understand, always drilling for more detail," Williams shared in a piece for Business Insider last year.

With so much information to process after each meeting, Gates has turned to AI to help him manage the task. In a recent interview with The Verge, Gates revealed his go-to AI feature: meeting summaries.

"I'd say the feature I use the most is the meeting summary, which is integrated into [Microsoft] Teams, which I use a lot," Gates explained. "The ability to interact and not just get the summary, but ask questions about the meeting, is pretty fantastic."

The AI tool Bill Gates refers to is Microsoft's Copilot, an advanced feature powered by the company's partnership with OpenAI. Copilot is available as an add-on feature for several Microsoft 365 apps, including Teams. It allows users to extract important information from documents, search through conversations, and tackle tasks using AI’s capability to organize and summarize data more efficiently.

AI-Powered Tools: A Productivity Booster

Gates is not alone in his reliance on AI for managing meetings. The rise of machine learning tools is changing the way office workers handle daily tasks. From scheduling meetings to note-taking and data entry, AI is helping professionals save time. According to a Hubspot survey conducted last year, many workers have managed to cut up to two hours per day off their schedules using AI-powered tools for these administrative tasks.

For some users, the capabilities of Copilot go beyond just helping with meetings—they allow them to skip meetings altogether by relying on AI-generated recaps to catch up on what was discussed. This has been a game-changer in office productivity, offering a solution for employees who want to minimize time spent in meetings without missing critical information.

AI: Fast but Limited

Despite his strong advocacy for AI, Gates is pragmatic about its limitations. In another interview earlier this year, he explained that while AI excels at performing well-defined tasks—like transcribing and summarizing meeting notes—it struggles with problems that even humans find difficult to manage.

"If it's a problem that humans are not good at dealing with, then present techniques don't create some novel approach," Gates said, underscoring that AI is currently best suited to speeding up tasks that humans can already do, albeit more slowly.

The Financial Impact of AI in Meetings

While AI's role in meetings may not seem like the most groundbreaking application of the technology, the potential savings in time and money are significant. A survey from Reclaim.ai found that employees spend more than a third of their work hours in meetings. With the average pay in the US, this translates to approximately $29,000 per worker each year.

The use of AI tools like Copilot can drastically cut down on time spent in meetings and, consequently, reduce the financial burden associated with them. Gates’ use of AI for meeting summaries demonstrates a practical, real-world application of the technology that not only enhances productivity but also saves valuable resources.