Powow AI, a startup applying Machine Learning to business meetings, announces general availability of version 1.0 of Powow, their flagship SaaS product. Powow gives Ops and IT managers and teams new ways to gain value from meetings and save significant meeting costs. The AI Agent “attends” meetings to listen, understand, and generate shareable insights from business meetings. As companies increasingly move to virtual meetings due to the global pandemic, the importance of capturing and mining insights automatically using machine learning cannot be overstated. Powow is here to enable the future of collaborative work.
In version 1.0 Powow AI introduces:
- A Federated Framework for workgroups that allows virtually unlimited scaling and provides executives with the ability to derive insights across the corporation.
- A proprietary Speech to Text engine optimized for business meetings
- Support for all major teleconference platforms, including seamless integration with Microsoft Teams
The Opportunity
Business meetings are ubiquitous, expensive, and offer opaque and often untapped value; the problem is growing daily. According to a 2019 study of 19 million meetings, unproductive meetings cost $399 Billion dollars annually – in the US alone. According to Forbes, worldwide businesses hold 55 million meetings per day and half don’t accomplish much of substance.
COVID-19 has accelerated the enterprise challenge. Microsoft reported that Teams grew from 900 million meeting minutes per day in March 2020 to a peak of 2.7 billion in April. This translates to 5 billion meeting minutes per day in the US alone across all platforms.
This is reminiscent of the 20th century advertising quandary, as captured by legendary retailer John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted – I just don’t know which half.” We now have tools to optimize advertising, but we have been slow to apply analytics within and across meetings. That’s why Powow AI is developing and delivering meeting analytics as a service.
Co-founder Gil Makleff – “In my past as a digital transformation leader, we were forced to over-invite people to meetings and schedule follow-ups to discuss what happened at the last meeting. Tasks went unassigned, requirements were missed, and post-meeting dialogue was sparse. These inefficiencies, among others, pushed us to found Powow AI. Now, I don’t go to a meeting without it.”
Powow AI Answers the Right Questions
- What if you could save employee time by reducing meeting participation by 10-20% while increasing the ability to share information with the broader team?
- What if you could ensure all requirements, key points, and decisions are captured?
- What if you could get the insights and value from meetings without actually attending them and broaden the conversation with post-meeting dialogue?
- What if you could use meeting content as a brand new data source to improve your organization’s performance overall?
Powow uses the latest advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, emotion detection, and natural language processing (NLP) to multiply the effectiveness and efficiency of business meetings.
Breakthrough Innovation
Co-Founder Artem Koren – “Today, we are at the cusp of a phase transition from classical computational models to those powered by AI. At Powow, we harness the power of this new generation of algorithms to unlock new dimensions of value in business-enabling technologies.“
Powow AI uses NLP to capture the essence of business conversations, while supporting human-in-the-loop post-meeting clarifications and annotations.
Prior to the 1.0 release, Powow AI conducted a six month beta program with users from IT, consulting, venture capital, and nonprofits. Feedback from the beta program was used to enhance user experience and add critical features, focused around four areas:
- Accelerate time to content
- Assure privacy and security
- Analyze meetings horizontally and vertically
- Enable post-meeting dialogue
Version 1.0 includes such innovative features as:
- Federated workgroups
- Automated summaries
- Smart meeting minutes
- Action, issue, and question detection
- Cross-meeting topic affinity-identification
- Meeting group and series analysis
STORM Insights Founder and AI analyst Adrian Bowles – “Powow does more than simply chronicling who said what during meetings – it offers insights that help you change the way you approach meetings altogether. Imagine being able to miss a meeting and still gain the insight of how decisions were made and discover which members of your team offered persuasive insights.”
