Meeting prep can be more of a time sink than the meeting itself—unless it doesn’t get done, in which the meeting itself often becomes a waste of time.
And sure, for those who might not have much to say or whose preparations are fairly simple, this may not be a big deal. But as meetings become more important, the value and importance of preparation only increases. And that data scavenger hunt is where time gets devoured.
It’s one thing to pull together most of the relevant files and documents. That part is pretty easy, at least for the material you’ve been working on recently. Of course, there may be a few missing, but those can’t be that important, right? And then there’s the emails, the Slack conversations across multiple channels, the transcripts of previous meetings, and so on. Tracking down all that information, figuring out what’s relevant, and making sense of it all takes time and effort—internal data is rarely optimized for search. While maybe this isn’t a big deal for just one meeting, if you have multiple meetings the time quickly adds up.
How Can AI Search Reclaim Lost Time?
AI search can help reclaim that lost time, provided it’s done correctly. Any AI search tool that requires that you upload all your data to their cloud is simply a non-starter, for two major reasons:
First, security. Do you really want to put your private data in someone else’s cloud where it can get hacked? Given regulatory requirements around data protection and personally identifiable information, uploading data may not even be an option.
Second, practicality. Internal enterprise data is scattered across multiple technologies and locations. Are you really going to upload everyone’s files, email, Slack (or WebEx, or…) conversations, notes, transcripts, and everything else to an AI vendor? Pulling everything together—extracting data from its current locations, transforming it, and loading it into new destination (aka ETL)—is a major engineering project all by itself. It’s also probably a never-ending one since new emails, conversations, transcripts, and documents are constantly being created.
SWIRL AI Search solves the information scatter problem and finds you the information you need when you need it. SWIRL integrates with existing security protocols and is Zero ETL: it doesn’t require large scale data movement (you don’t even need a vector database). Because SWIRL leaves data in place and simultaneously searches all repositories to which you have access, SWIRL can find relevant information without comprising speed or security. SWIRL uses AI to figure out which information matters based on your query and returns results sorted by relevance. SWIRL runs entirely on-premises and lets you use any AI model which your organization has approved.
SWIRL reduces the time it takes to find relevant information from 7-9 hours per week to less than one hour. To find out how SWIRL can help you reduce your meeting prep time, contact us today.