AI, Meetings, and the End of the Blank Page
The blank page is disappearing. AI is shifting work from creative burden to judgment, raising the baseline of clarity and follow-through. Daniel Manary chats with Aydin Mirzaee from Fellow.ai.
š Hey friends, Arianne here, editor and producer of Artificial Insights, the podcast. Welcome! This is TL;DL where I write about what stood out to me in each episode, share some food for thought, and do a roundup of what happened and whatās next for those of us who prefer to read.
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Canāt believe weāre in Season 4! Itās been a ride. Have I mentioned I really like my job?
One of the cool things about editing AI conversations is that you start to notice when a technology is changing expectations. Itās really not just a tool anymore.
The truth is, AI raises the floor. It makes a higher baseline of output feel normal, even for people who do not naturally work in a disciplined, highly structured way.
In meetings, thatās easy to see. The organized 10-15% used to be the ones who wrote the agenda, captured decisions, and followed up. Now a system can do a lot of that. The result is a different minimum standard for clarity and follow-through. And thatās pretty neat.
šļø Just Interviewed: Aydin Mirzaee on how AI can make everyone seem organized
Everything could be aided by AI and all of a sudden you could get the results without putting in the effort, which sounds like too good to be true, but like weāve seen what AI can do, right?
Aydin Mirzaee is the CEO and co-founder of Fellow, an AI meeting assistant designed to support teams before, during, and after meetings.
He has been building Fellow since 2019, which matters because he lived through the pre-AI limitation of meeting tools: they work best for people who are already organized.
He shared a customer insight I found unusually concrete. The earliest version of Fellow worked extremely well, but mainly for the most structured slice of a company. Everyone else wanted the outcomes of organization without the friction of doing the work.
AI changed the math. It made it possible to raise the baseline across the company, instead of relying on a few people dragging, sometimes reluctantly, everyone forward.
š” One Core Insight: AI raises the floor, then changes what āgoodā looks like
Aydin gave us a recruiting example that made the āraising the floorā idea really click for me.
He described a recruiter who meets with candidates, decides someone is a fit, then uses Fellowās āAsk Fellowā feature to generate a high-quality write-up to send to the customer.
He framed the difference this way: if you were placing the CEO of PepsiCo, you would write an exceptionally thoughtful email. For a smaller role, you would not spend that time. With AI, you can write an exceptionally thoughtful email for a smaller role, too.
The floor is rising! š
Not that AI makes people brilliant by defaultā¦ But, when baseline work gets easier, teams and individuals can redirect effort toward judgment, prioritization, and accountability. You know, the important human stuff.
š One Key Clip: Why most teams never get past ābasicā AI
In the bonus episode, Aydin named what he sees as the real bottleneck to AI adoption: workflow change.
At the end of the day, it isnāt about model quality or access to tech. Itās just change management.
He explained that most people can get surface-level value from AI tools quickly, but the deeper value requires rethinking how work gets done, and that is hard to do under deadline pressure.
Sound familiar? You can finish the task the old way by Friday, or you can experiment with AI, spend more time upfront, and risk frustration or failure. Most people say, āIāll try it when I have more time.ā
Organizations that want real gains have to create space without deadlines. That is the only way new workflows emerge and teams (and people!) can grow.
The clip is short, but it explains why many AI tools stall at novelty. Raising the floor requires patience before it pays off.
š„” One Takeaway: When AI removes the blank page
Daniel shared a thought after the interview that helped me name what felt different about this conversation.
Before Fellow became AI-first, running good meetings required a series of small creative decisions. What should the agenda look like? What mattered most in that call? What do we need to follow up on next time?
That kind of work rewards people who are comfortable with a blank pageā¦ while excluding the ones who may not be so comfortable.
What AI changes, as Daniel put it, is the type of decision being asked of us. Instead of inventing from scratch, we are editing. Instead of asking āWhat should this be?ā we are asked āIs this right?ā
I think itās interesting. Editing is cognitively easier than creating, after all. It lowers the barrier to participation. You can reject the agenda. You can tweak the follow-up. You are still deciding. You are just not starting from a blank page.
That feels like another version of the floor rising. Not because people care less, but because the system makes it easier to engage at a higher baseline.
š„ Up Next: Adeel Zaman on when AI leaves the screen
The next conversation pushes AI beyond meetings, documents, and software interfaces.
Daniel will be sitting down with Adeel Zaman, CTO and Co-Founder of DOZR, to explore what happens when AI begins to reason and act in the physical world. Adeel has moved from deep learning research to scaling startups, and now focuses on what he calls embodied intelligence. Real sci-fi stuff.
āØ Raising the floor without losing the human
I think when AI raises the baseline quality of everyday work, it reshapes who can participate, how decisions get made, and where human effort is best spent.
More than just removing humans from the loop and reducing headcount, AI removes unnecessary friction. That means fewer blank pages, fewer dropped threads, and more generally organized people. In the best case, this also means more room for judgment, attention, and care.
Thatās pretty exciting.
As always, thanks for listening. š
P.S. Artificial Insights is a podcast on how AI is changing work, lifeāand us. Every other Friday, Daniel Manary sits down with leaders, thinkers, and builders in AI to have candid conversations on what theyāre doing right now and how they think the world will change. If youāre a podcast listener, weād love for you to check us out!
P.P.S. If you liked the episode, please subscribe, share, and/or give the show a review on your favorite podcast player! Every little bit goes a long way. š
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