Emergence of AI Teams Personal Assistants and Data Privacy & security:
Artificial intelligence can be defined as the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. With the things getting tougher and complicated, everyone would love to reduce the redundant manual efforts and utilize the time to concentrate on most business critical things and increase the overall productivity.
Need of hour for a Teams Meeting Personal Assistant
Everyone would love having a dedicated personal assistant (a Human or an AI) in assisting them with redundant tasks like arranging their busy meeting schedules, keep a tab of ongoing appointments, automate capturing of meeting notes and provide with holistic data and minutes post meeting for swift decision making.
Thus, with the emergence of AI technology, many technically competent organizations have been able to deliver AI personal assistants for Mail and Teams with their special inbuilt scheduling and AI capabilities utilizing the Speech to Text converters and making the Meeting notes available across to the hosts and intended participants post completion of meeting.
Superfluous tasks are being now taken care with these mesmerizing AI products which uses the technology to sync up the user’s calendar and keep a track and join the meetings as an anonymous guest user and with its Speech to Text AI capabilities generate the meeting notes and provide the users with Summary and clearly call out on any Action points and moreover providing a multi lingual support, which can be of great use for business users who keep jumping across to multiple meetings.
Below is a quick potential architecture diagram of a 3rd Party AI Enabled Teams Meeting Personal Assistant interacting with a user Mailbox to sync and track of given user’s meeting invitations and an AI enabled bot with a generic guest username joining the given Teams meeting as an anonymous guest user and capture the meeting notes and share it back with user over email.
In this line of products, Microsoft have been using the GPT3 AI capabilities for delivering these advanced functionalities with Teams Premium license known as Intelligent Recap. Intelligent recap is provided by Microsoft based on the meeting data, and specifically the meeting transcript, meeting recording, attendance report, and the names of the invitees. Intelligent recap in Teams the Microsoft’s very owned AI product feature will help users in automatic generation of meeting notes divided into Chapters and sections for ease of data relevance, as well as meeting topics thus allowing users to jump to a point in the meeting when a certain topic was discussed.
Absolutely this line of AI products is a boon for all the individuals who are usually busy all times with multiple and conflicting meeting schedules and keeping track of all the meetings and having the meeting notes at fingertips would really help them enhance the overall productivity.
3rd Party AI Teams Meeting Personal Assistant and Data Privacy
However, the question we do have over here is about the data processing and storage capabilities across 3rd party data centers and information compliance, data encryption and privacy regulations at vendor end, where the actual meeting participant organizations does not have any control. Teams Meetings can host business critical information related to internal trade secrets to Merger and Acquisition information and any accidental data leaks by the 3rd party vendor organization or having this business data and decisions in wrong hands might lead to a ripple effect and adversely damaging the reputation of organization.
To add more complexity to this issue, GDRP and other critical data regulations in place with business critical data processing at a 3rd party organization end without a standard Non-Disclosure Agreement can be alarming and cause of concern.
Working with Financial, Scientific & Research and Health Providers and their adherence to stringent information policies and data regulations, enabling of this bot for any user working with a given company can enable the Bot for capturing data and risking the organization data.
With the ease of subscribing for this freely available 3rd party AI bots to sync up user’s calendar and instantaneously start the meeting transcriptions with summary by any user looking for innovative ways.
Conclusion
Though being an ardent fan of innovation and AI capabilities, it would be great to have these great features embedded and made available from Microsoft directly in upcoming releases which may not only ensure in data privacy and security but also compliance with multiple data compliance and regulation standards. Any interested organizations can have NDAs with respective 3rd party organizations for utilization of this great features and enhance the productivity.
If your organization doesn’t have an NDA yet with these 3rd party organizations, and your business stake holders are keen on have stringent information controls and data restrictions for Teams Meetings, then following below mentioned practices might help.
- Educate users and all its partners and guest users from refraining use of any available 3rd party apps or Meeting Personal Assistants.
- Tenant wide Teams Meeting refraining control of bypassing lobby access to Everyone.
- Meeting hosts and organization users to be cautious while allowing user accounts waiting in lobby and be mindful of any suspicious guest users in meeting.