What We Learned from Letting AI Sit In on Our Leadership Meetings

We Called It Echo. Then It Started Talking Back.

It started as a joke some time back.
We were in a leadership sync when someone said, “I wish an AI could just take notes and tell us what we actually decided.”
Everyone laughed. I didn’t.

So, we ran a small experiment. We fed transcripts from our weekly meetings into a tool—custom prompts, tone analysis, summarization.
We called it Echo.
Not because it spoke, but because we hoped it would reflect.

We didn’t expect it to understand us.
We definitely didn’t expect it to understand us better than we understood ourselves.

Week 1: The “Everything’s Fine” Meeting
Supply Chain and Finance disagreed. Politely. Formally. You’ve seen it before—phrases like “good point,” “let’s revisit,” “we’ll align later.”

Echo’s summary?
“Unresolved conflict detected. Suggest follow-up before operational impact.”

There it was.
What we all felt, but no one said.
Echo caught it—not just the words, but the weight behind them.

Week 3: The Strategy Spiral
One of those meetings where we talked a lot, moved post-its around, and felt… productive.

Echo disagreed.
Its summary read:
“High discussion activity. No clear prioritization. Ownership unclear on key items.”

It was brutal. And accurate.
Like getting performance-reviewed by a spreadsheet with emotional intelligence.

Week 5: The Quiet Voice
A team member—one of our sharpest—raised a subtle concern during a roadmap review.
No one pushed back, but the moment passed quickly.

Echo flagged the moment:
“Risk acknowledged, not explored. Speaker engagement dropped for the remainder of session.”

And just like that, it made visible what leadership often misses:
Silence doesn’t equal agreement.
And presence doesn’t mean participation.

What Echo Taught Us Had Nothing to Do with Tech
Echo didn’t judge. It didn’t rank ideas.
It didn’t know who had what title, or who usually “wins” meetings.
It just listened. And reflected.

And that’s what made it uncomfortable.

Because without meaning to, it became a mirror.
Of our habits. Our blind spots.
Our tendency to defer decisions with polished phrases and confident head nods.

It didn’t make us better leaders.
It just reminded us where we still had work to do.

Would I Recommend It? Absolutely. Just Be Ready.
You don’t bring in AI to save time.
You bring it in to show you the time you’ve been wasting.

But here’s the thing:
AI doesn’t understand context. It doesn’t know when someone’s being sarcastic or when they’re just tired.
It doesn’t know if a pause means disagreement—or just thinking.

That’s still our job.

So yes, Echo gave us insights.
But the real leadership wasn’t in what it saw.
It was in how we responded.

Regards,
Rupesh