Sorry, but ‘I Missed the Meeting’ Is No Longer an Excuse

White-collar drones complain about going to meetings. But they also complain about not going to them: If you miss a crucial discussion, you’re out of the loop. Nobody takes good notes, people forget what was said or remember selectively. Information dies. You can record meetings, but who’s going to listen to hours of that?

Last year, Zack Kanter—the CEO of Stedi, which makes business-to-business software—experimented with a new tool, Rewatch, that tries to solve this problem. Every time Stedi employees hold meetings on Zoom, Rewatch records the whole thing, then uses voice-dictation AI to transcribe it. That means Kanter and his 56 employees, who all work remotely, now have a searchable archive of everything said in all meetings.

“It’s unbelievably useful for us,” he says. Let’s say he’s setting up a meeting with a client. He can search in the archive and find every instance where that client was discussed, and if he really wants context, he can watch the video. If engineers miss a meeting, they can skim the transcript and grasp the essentials of a decision or an argument. “In a distributed company, the biggest question is like, how do I get visibility? I can’t overhear hallway conversations,” Kanter says. “Well, now you can.”