AI disrupts meetings

This week, I want to introduce you to an entrepreneur who’s using AI in a way that feels truly disruptive.

My interview with Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of Silicon Valley tech firm Otter.ai, certainly is like nothing I've experienced before. However, it might be the future.

We meet at a café inside the lobby of a London hotel. He fires up the Otter app on his phone, lays it on the table and starts recording. He opens his laptop, where he's also logged in to Otter.

Five minutes into our conversation, he is already interrogating what we've discussed so far. In near real-time, the transcript (which has travelled across the Atlantic and back and seems unfazed by the hotel’s muzak) appears on the laptop’s browser. He uses a sidebar to ask his questions, receiving summaries of our key points.

He's been discussing his company’s big idea, the Conversational Knowledge Engine, which he thinks is the future of the workplace. But it comes with an important caveat that not everyone will agree with: all work meetings should, in principle, be recorded.

Otter.ai's workforce is its own Customer Zero, so it’s been following this strategy by using this frontier tech for many years. “I expect [staff] to record everything all the time,” he tells me.

This includes both internal and client-facing calls. The idea is that all data can be analysed by AI intelligently and logically, without human bias or fallibility.

“Otter actually knows everything about the business,” Liang tells me. “A lot of businesses are slow and inefficient because of information silos. Companies spend more than 50 per cent of the payroll dollars to pay people to go to meetings, yet most of that conversational knowledge is not even captured. So you can imagine how much waste this creates.”

Teams not talking to each other and ‘information silos’ – that’s certainly two things I hear a lot from SME owners. It leads to a lack of that revered word, “alignment”. People running around like headless chickens would be another way to put it.

As well as offering data to steer the company more efficiently and rationally, transcription also opens up the possibility of better personal feedback. This applies to the CEO too. Liang himself is of course also 'on-record' all the time. He uses AI for his personal development, like a coach. Sometimes he will analyse his own performance after a meeting. Or ask AI to give him feedback on his last 40 meetings. Did he talk too little? Did he listen enough?

He reflects: “When human beings give me feedback, sometimes I get emotionally embarrassed, or sometimes I get too defensive. But when AI gives me feedback, I have nobody to be angry at. I can take it more objectively.”

This week’s guest on the Business Leader podcast is a revered business leader who really doesn’t give many interviews (if you don’t believe me, Google him). Christopher de Lapuente masterminded the rise of Sephora, turning it into a global force in the world of beauty retail.

After an illustrious career at Procter & Gamble, he was ready to take early retirement in his late 40s. But then in 2011, he got the chance to join the fabled LVMH luxury group, led by Bernard Arnault, becoming Sephora’s first global CEO. LVMH had bought Sephora in the late 1990s and, after a faltering start in the US, had found a model that could succeed on the world stage. But execution is everything.

How did he do it? How did he get revenues from around €2m to €16m during his tenure?

He explains everything in great detail to Sir Richard Harpin in the latest Business Leader podcast.

Guess the company

• This group can trace its origins back to 1765
• One of its best-known brands began life in a northern English town famous for wool and textiles
• It employs over 60,000 people
• It has over 28 million customers
• It was one of the first companies in its sector to launch an app
• It has over 500 high street and mobile branches throughout the UK

You'll find the answer at the bottom of this page

1. New legislation requiring large companies to pay smaller suppliers’ bills within 60 days will not be weakened in response to lobbying from big business, Peter Kyle has promised. The business secretary said “there is no way that I’m going to resile from delivering” reforms which he said were a “step change in the relationship between all larger businesses and their supply chains”.
2. SpaceX unveiled its plans to list publicly on the US stock market, disclosing its investor prospectus and revealing details about its financials for the first time. Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite operations company will go public on the Nasdaq exchange at a valuation of about $1.75trn under the symbol SPCX, likely on 12 June. Meanwhile, there is heightened speculation that ChatGPT maker OpenAI is also planning its IPO, which could see its valuation set at $1trn.
3. Keir Starmer has struck a trade deal with six Gulf states in what he described as a huge win for British business, ending four years of talks led by four different prime ministers. The deal will offer £3.7bn worth of opportunities for exporters – double the original estimates – particularly in the food and luxury car sectors but also defence, aerospace, hospitality and other services, the government said.
4. Unemployment in the UK has risen to 5 per cent while wage growth has slowed, according to official figures, in the first snapshot of how companies are reacting to the impact of the Iran war. The ONS said the rate of unemployment was up in the three months to March, from 4.9 per cent in the three months to February, a rate that City economists had expected to hold steady.
5. The government has launched a new specialist unit to target high street businesses suspected of being used to launder criminal cash, including vape stores, barbers, mini-marts and sweet shops. The £20m National Crime Agency cell will coordinate investigations and raids into UK retail outlets believed to be acting as fronts for organised crime.

Weekend reading

❓ Are you meeting the needs of the people you lead?

Organisations often assume leadership succeeds or fails because of a leader’s style. But research on follower psychology suggests the bigger issue is alignment: Employees judge leaders based on whether they provide what people need most in a given moment. Drawing on research across the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, the Harvard Business Review argues that the best leaders are not defined by a single leadership style, but by their ability to diagnose shifting follower needs and adapt before misalignment erodes trust, engagement, and performance.

🏘️ How an AI jobs bloodbath could hit house prices at the worst possible time

AI is already reshaping the jobs market and it may soon test the foundations of the UK housing market. As unemployment rises, vacancies fall and AI-exposed workers face mounting pressure, experts warn that reduced buyer demand, higher mortgage stress and weaker confidence could collide with stubbornly high borrowing costs. For business leaders, the question is no longer just how AI changes work, but whether it could trigger the next major property shock.

And finally

'Tis the season for university commencement speeches across the pond. It harkens back to the iconic addresses, such as Roger Federer's in 2024 on grit and Steve Jobs' 2005 masterclass at Stanford on embracing failure and confronting mortality.

However, 2026's class of commencement addresses have seen an interesting trend: speakers being booed when talking about AI. Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield was booed at the University of Central Florida, as was Scott Borchetta, CEO of Big Machine Records, at Middle Tennessee State University.

The latest to fall foul of students was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At a speech at the University of Arizona's graduation ceremony, Schmidt said: “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear.

“There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”

While there is irony that students would have no doubt leaned on the tech to achieve their status as a graduate, as Schmidt points out, this is a reflection of a growing anxiety among students on the verge of entering a disrupted job market.

On a lighter note, country star Eric Church delivered a fantastic speech at the University of North Carolina titled “the six strings of life” that I can't recommend enough.

The answer to our question is Lloyds Banking Group.