From Advanced Autocomplete to Usefulness

May 24, 2025

One of the most annoying tasks during business days is to schedule urgent meetings with people who are always buys. For weeks in advance you will not find a suitable time slot with one of them, let alone with three or more people. You always need to reach out individually, to ask if they can free up some time or ask someone else to support you. In any case, this involves a lot of back and forth just to schedule a meeting. Manual labor that could be used better.

Here I expect AI to support. The task is easy: Schedule a meeting with these three people within the next couple of days. If AI is supposed to help is with manual tasks, I expect this to be a good use case.
But here comes the tricky part: It shall not just schedule the meeting and cancel others but take into account the importance of the other meeting. First, the importance of my meeting compared to the existing ones. And secondly, what would this mean for the participants of the other meetings that would need to be cancelled. The AI has to make several weighted decisions to find a proper time slot. Once a potential meeting slot is found, this of course also needs to be properly managed. You cannot simply plan a new meeting one hour in advance; you need to leave the participants some time to prepare. So half a day till several days in advance would be the perfect time.

Many people would like to see a future where AI has access to all our (company) data and knows what we work, read and talk. I therefore expect that the AI that can actually support me with the annoying task of scheduling meetings. Unless this can be done as outlined here above, AI will only be a better autocomplete feature for me.