An artificial intelligence expert says "all the components exist" for a digital twin to attend virtual meetings and speak on your behalf within several years as the technology advances.
Zoom chief executive Eric Zuan recently said employees would be able to send their digital twin to a work meeting so they can do other things, like go to the beach.
Innovation consultant Ed Dever said his company was already using artificial intelligence technology tools in their meetings.
"Probably in the last six months, we've been inviting AI to a lot of our meetings.
"There are definitely cases where I haven't been able to be at a meeting, or I need to be in two places at once."
Dever said the technology had been "more useful than we'd ever imagined it would be" as the AI could provide insights that weren't able to be gleaned from traditional transcription.
"It's almost as if you had someone sitting next to you taking notes, with the ability to then inquire if something was mentioned or [ask] 'did this topic come up?,' [and] what sorts of things were talked about with regard to this particular topic."
Justin Flitter from New Zealand AI told Breakfast that "all the elements of being able to create a digital avatar" that could contribute to meetings for you already existed.
"But, they're not quite ready to attend a meeting and speak on your behalf," he said.
Flitter said AI for business tools could already be invited to meetings through most applications including Teams, Skype and Zoom. It would then transcribe what was said in the meeting and efficiently create summaries and actions such as to-do lists.
"People have been using these tools for a long time now and they are the biggest productivity gain that people are seeing is with summarising meetings [and] summarising long and complex documents are the most popular use-cases."
Flitter said the biggest security threat for businesses at the moment is employees bringing their own personal AI tools to work.
"Businesses need to be deploying enterprise-grade AI solutions so that all of the meeting transcriptions, all the conversations, negotiations sit within your tenancy. So that you have control, it inherits all of your security protocols."
Asked how long it would be before an AI avatar would be able to contribute to a meeting on your behalf, Flitter took a deep breath before answering: "We're a couple of years away from that."
"[The AI] would have to know about your work projects, and the status of those work projects and it would have to have access to some documents to be able to articulate where those projects are at. That is probably a bit further down the track.
"But all of the components exist."
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