This morning’s team meeting gave me pause: seven people dialled in, and five different AI note-takers logged attendance alongside us. Instantly, the old fantasy of a single “company AI” looked almost quaint. We’re quietly moving to a world where everyone brings their own AI to work. The question isn’t if, but when we must redraw the rules.
• It’s no longer unusual to spot several AI agents working away in the same meeting - taking notes, summarising, even acting as personal research assistants.
• This is bigger than the old “bring your own device” (BYOD). Now, it’s about context. Workers want digital agents tuned to their individual projects, history, and style.
• A recent study found, “About 1 in 5 workers (19%) now use AI tools to take meeting notes, and frequent users are more likely to get promoted and earn higher salaries.”
AI Note Taking at Work: Benefits and Drawbacks (https://softwarefinder.com/resources/ai-note-taking-tools), Trust rating: Moderate (original reporting, user data sampling, cited in multiple industry reports), 2025-10-06
• But with so many AIs, normal meeting etiquette breaks down. Agents crowd the video call, duplicate effort, and stir up new questions around data ownership and privacy.
• “Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that are designed to independently carry out complex tasks with little or no human supervision. At the core of agentic AI is the concept of an AI agent: a piece of software that, when added on to a traditional large language model, allows it to make decisions and act on them with a human-like degree of autonomy.”
What is Agentic AI? Benefits, Risks, and Outlook (https://www.humansecurity.com/learn/topics/what-is-agentic-ai-benefits-risks-and-outlook/), Trust rating: Moderate-High (industry security vendor, clear editorial transparency), 2023-12-13
• For leadership, the gold is in the convergence: tools are personal, context-aware, and always “on.” Meetings become data-rich but also legally and culturally riskier.
• “AI note-taking tools shine in brainstorming and project updates, but workers say they fail to capture nuance, raising trust and privacy concerns.”
AI Note Taking at Work: Benefits and Drawbacks (https://softwarefinder.com/resources/ai-note-taking-tools), Trust rating: Moderate, 2025-10-06
• The analogy with BYOD is helpful, but incomplete. When someone leaves, does their AI get to keep the context, notes, and prompts it gathered on the job or does all that stay with the employer?
• Several platforms already allow users to set agent permissions (do they just take notes, or can they email, transcribe, or analyse files?). Meeting hosts have to think fast: should AI agents get fewer rights than humans, and if so, who decides?
• New leadership dilemma: how do you support personalised digital work without sleepwalking into a privacy or compliance disaster?
• Accept that BYOAI is already here. You likely can’t ban it nor should you try.
• Update onboarding, meeting invites, and policies to define what AIs are allowed to do (before they become digital squatters in your meetings).
• Shortlist collaboration tools that make agent boundaries and permissions visible and easy to adjust on the fly.
• Open up space for feedback about discomfort. Not everyone is happy to have meetings monitored, recorded, or summarised by an opaque black box.
• “To safely enable AI agents on your web and application surfaces, you need a new layer of governance. This is the role of AgenticTrust ... built to provide the visibility, control, and adaptive governance required for the agentic era.”
What is Agentic AI? Benefits, Risks, and Outlook (https://www.humansecurity.com/learn/topics/what-is-agentic-ai-benefits-risks-and-outlook/), Trust rating: Moderate-High, 2023-12-13
It’s not a theoretical concern agents now influence who gets promoted, set meeting records, and shape narrative memory. The trick isn’t to resist, but to reframe old rules and build new muscle for digital etiquette, agent permissions, and knowledge boundaries.
There’s no going back. The future now looks like a roomful of humans, each flanked by their own silent (but always listening) digital ambassador. Clever leaders won’t ban this they’ll steer it.
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