Online employment marketplace SEEK is looking to use AI to optimise time spent in meetings and to make multi-language gatherings run more smoothly.
Group commercial executive Peter Bithos told last week’s Zoomtopia summit that the company is in the early days of using Zoom’s AI companion, a so-called “smart assistant” added to the videoconferencing service last year.
It can be used to summarise meetings in multiple languages and offers ‘smart recordings’, which can divide recorded meetings into chapters.
Bithos explained he prefers receiving “summarised meeting notes with hot links to video clips that I could then go, click, click, click, and see that snippet of the meeting”.
“You can see where the technology is going,” he said.
“We are very interested because the more we can make it easier for people on the periphery of an issue not to attend a meeting and instead of having a 30-minute discussion, they can, in five or 10 minutes, digest the relevant content, [it means] they’re productive, connected, and still feel they know what was happening in the room.
Given the countries SEEK works across – it has offices in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – reducing language barriers is also a key goal.
Bithos said Seek’s strategy for “about four or five years” has been to “create a single Asia Pacific business” operating on a single technology stack, with a unified go-to-market focus.
He sees a role for Zoom to support that by breaking down language differences between the markets.
“I myself, run teams all over Asia Pacific. On Monday, I was in Bangkok. Tuesday, I was in Bangkok. Wednesday, I was in Kuala Lumpur. Today I’m in Singapore, and next week, I’ll be in Melbourne,” he said.
“This issue of managing multi-languages and multi-culture is very important.”
Seek currently runs its “big meetings with automatic translation subtitles” which “has been extremely helpful in getting a functional understanding” of what’s happening in different markets.
“That has been quite transformational … We had no way of connecting with the average [employee] in Thailand, by way of example.
“Now, at least we can rationally communicate.”
He saw a future where technology could synthesize his voice and, in real-time, translate his speech into a different language on a call.
“These are the little moments of creating culture that matter, and the technology is getting there very fast,” he said.