AI holds promise for supporting neurodiverse employees in meetings

In today’s fast-paced work environment, AI-powered meeting tools are emerging as game-changers, not only enhancing overall productivity but also offering vital support for neurodiverse employees. Research by a local tech company shows that these tools significantly benefit individuals with ADHD or dyslexia by easing the mental burden of note-taking and post-meeting documentation.

Hannah Hardy-Jones, co-founder of Contented, embarked on a mission to explore these benefits through 70 "coffee dates" with professionals during June 2024. Her goal was to understand meeting challenges and test AI meeting tools.

The results uncovered surprising advantages, particularly for neurodiverse individuals in the workplace.

Hannah discovered that AI tools can greatly reduce the stress associated with capturing and processing meeting information. For individuals with ADHD or dyslexia, this relief from the mental load of note-taking can be transformative.

“I think really surprising to me, actually was just the level of neurodiversity. From the perspective of, particularly around ADHD and dyslexia, the mental load and the issues around how do you capture a conversation is so much harder for people with ADHD or potentially with autism, because there's a lot of overthinking at the time of the meeting how to effectively capture that and do both, you know, writing notes and engaging with somebody,” Hannah says.

She points out that traditional meeting practices often impede engagement and productivity, especially for neurodiverse individuals.

Key issues identified included the challenge of recording all critical points and the mental effort required to translate meeting discussions into actionable outputs like proposals or strategies.

Ineffective meetings, she says, frequently occur when too many participants are present without a direct role in the discussion, resulting in a “cast of thousands.”

“That social perspective around meetings a lot of time is why people really don't enjoy them, because they feel like there's a lot being said that's maybe not captured, maybe some people aren’t being heard.”

She says AI meeting tools tackle these challenges by reducing human error and bias in note-taking as, typically, people only record what they consider relevant, which can lead to incomplete or skewed notes.

“There's a huge amount of bias as a as a note taker because you are looking for things that are interesting to you, what you deem to be relevant and actually there might be 50% of the conversation that you haven't even taken into account or you haven't written down.

From an accuracy perspective it's even things like numbers, when metrics are discussed or and if they're not written down, there's a huge risk of that inaccuracy”