Whether you’re sitting in an office or toiling from home, often the hardest part of work is having to deal with colleagues. Sometimes it’s collaborating with them, sometimes it’s avoiding them.
If only AI could help.
I believe that it can, if we put our minds to it. Or somebody’s mind to it. What if the technology that’s so good at guessing our next Amazon purchase or even figuring out what we’re going to type next in our emails could help do the same thing in our communications with our colleagues? It could anticipate what we need and instantly find ways to fine-tune our interactions to make collaboration easier.
Here are my nominees and my wild imaginings about what AI could do for us.
The problem: It takes multiple meetings or dozens of emails for you and your colleagues to reach an understanding on a key issue.
The solution: the colleague translator. This AI tool will learn the communication styles of your various colleagues by studying their emails and text messages, and adjust their online communication so that you’re actually able to understand one another.
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The colleague who always sounds angry because she writes in all caps, with no greetings or friendly asides? The colleague translator warms her up by converting her messages to sentence case and adding in a few words like “Hope you’re having a great day.” Got a junior assistant who floods you with so much background information and flattery that you can’t figure out what he’s trying to say? The colleague translator parses his emails and gives you the bullet-point, actionable version.
Need a little more TLC from an insufficiently appreciative boss? The colleague translator reads the nice comments he makes about your work to other people, then inserts them into the emails he sends you, so you actually know when he feels like “you really went above and beyond in your presentation to the board last week.”
Or maybe there’s a totally lovely lawyer on your team who always communicates in a friendly tone, but leaves you struggling with her legalese: The colleague translator uses its technical dictionary to replace her reference to stare decisis with “letting the decision stand.”
Premium upsell: a user control that lets you adjust the translator to your mood and needs. In a rush? Set it to candid, so your colleagues’ emails are pared down to the fewest possible words, without any of the embellishments that they added to avoid bruising your ego. Feeling blue? Set it to warm and fuzzy, so that incoming email arrives without any harsh language.
The problem: You’re trying to conduct a client call, but the person at the adjacent desk—this might be your office-mate, your spouse or your roommate—is on a call at the same time, and it’s so distracting.
The solution: the call director.
You give it a list of nearby colleagues (or it uses its omniscient location tracking to figure that out), and it manages your respective calendars and scheduling requests to minimize the occasions when you’re on the phone at the same time. If your office-mate has an 11 a.m. call booked next Tuesday, it will suggest 10 or noon as the best times for your own group meeting.
Premium upsell: auctions. You get to bid against your office-mate for speaking time, and the winning bidder gets the slot. So, if you outbid your roommate, you get to take your call at 4 p.m. and then knock off work, while he will have to wait until 5 p.m. to get the joy of a silent apartment for his call. (You might put all the money you’ve bid into a pool until the end of the month, then find an equitable way to distribute it—or maybe leave that to the AI.)
The problem: the dreaded “Zoom meeting fatigue.” You have so many video calls on your calendar that your brain (and legs) are going numb.
The solution: the meeting evader. This tool helps you see when you can avoid yet another video call by drawing on pre-existing information in your company communications.
Let’s say you’re about to set up a video call to discuss the plan for your quarterly sales report. Meeting evader prompts you for a meeting agenda, so you note that you need the latest sales figures, highest-value leads and sales, and current concerns and sales drivers.
Meeting evader then scans through the sales team’s shared drive and Slack/Teams channels, as well as your own email history, and compiles the information you thought required a meeting. Now you have your full report, plus an extra hour back in your day!
Premium upsell: the meeting blocker. It does the exact same thing as the meeting evader, but in the other direction: When someone requests your presence at a meeting, it refuses to book you without an agenda—nd then it uses the draft agenda to generate a reply by scouring your drives and communication for all the relevant information you could contribute, so you don’t actually have to take the meeting.
The problem: It’s hard to come up with great ideas when you’re working solo, but your colleagues are too busy to help you brainstorm.
The solution: the colleague simulator. You identify the colleagues you’d like to include in your online brainstorming session, and the colleague simulator constructs a simulated version based on their messages, emails and social-media presences.
Need the insight of the brainy co-worker who’s always up-to-date on the latest industry research? Colleague simulator scans everything she’s read or linked to, and echoes her point of view based on the kind of posts she usually writes or emails she usually sends or even (once we go full Big Brother) based on things she has said in the vicinity of a phone or digital home assistant. You have all the benefits of a sounding board, but unlike your real colleagues, your simulated colleagues aren’t insulted if you ignore their suggestions.
Premium upsell: celebrity colleagues. Once you’re simulating colleagues, why limit yourself to the people who happen to work in the same company? Your meeting can include extra-special virtual guests (Frida Kahlo, Albert Einstein) on a pay-per-colleague basis. You can even license yourself for use in other people’s simulations.
The problem: Your boss or colleagues feel annoyed when you zone out on a call and don’t know what they’re talking about when they ask you a question.
The solution: the job saver. Whenever you’re on a call, this app is running in the background, transcribing the conversation and using pattern recognition to predict when the conversation is coming around to a topic that directly concerns you.
Thirty seconds before your boss calls your name, the job saver delivers a small electric shock through your keyboard to get your attention, followed by a 20-second briefing that tells you what you missed while you were playing “Words With Friends.”
Premium upsell: video foregrounds. Yes, lots of videoconferencing apps let you disguise your background, but the job saver will also replace you in the foreground so that your colleagues can’t watch you doing the dishes, refinishing your floors or doing whatever it is you’re doing. When the job saver alerts you to pay attention, just return to your chair and the video foreground will return to live video mode.
The problem: Your colleagues interrupt you via email, messaging or phone just when you’ve finally gotten into a good flow on your own work.
The solution: inspiration protector. This app keeps a record of your work habits, so it knows the difference between a day when you’re just knocking out emails and an afternoon where you’re really feeling the spark of inspiration.
When your choice of applications or typing speed suggests that you have entered a flow state, the inspiration protector turns off your incoming-message notifications, closes the background window that might produce audible Facebook message pings and maybe even flips your phone into airplane mode. Anyone who tries to contact you gets an auto-reply telling them that you’re currently unavailable.
Premium upsell: the break taker. The same AI can observe when your focus or productivity tends to peter out. Instead of waiting until you’ve wasted an hour, the break taker anticipates the downturn and tells you it’s time to get up and go out for that walk.
Buy the full suite as a single package, and the break taker could also confer with the call director to schedule your sweetie’s lunch break at the same time, so you can take that refreshing walk together.
Dr. Samuel is a technology researcher and the co-author of the forthcoming book “Remote Inc.: How to Thrive at Work…Wherever You Are.” She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.