AI note-takers have quietly become normal. Someone joins a Teams or Zoom call, a bot joins with them, and by the afternoon there is a tidy transcript and a list of action items. It genuinely saves time. It also means a recording of your meeting has left your business.
A writer at XDA made the point plainly this week. He said he does not trust newer AI transcription services such as Otter and Fireflies with his meetings, because those meetings do not contain only his own information – they contain his clients’ information too. His answer was to run an open-source speech model called Whisper on his own laptop. A two-hour meeting came back as a usable transcript in about four minutes, and none of the audio left the room.
That is one person’s setup, not a recommendation for every business, and running your own tools has its own costs. But the question underneath it applies to all of us: when a bot sits in on a client call, who ends up holding that recording, how long do they keep it, and is it used to train anything?
The pressure is only heading one way. AI transcription is increasingly bundled into the tools you already pay for rather than bought separately – one industry blogger this week noted a modest annual price rise on Zoom Workplace Pro that comes with AI note-taking included. The easier it gets, the less anyone stops to ask where the audio goes.
Three practical steps worth taking this month:
- Find out which note-takers are actually joining your meetings. In most small businesses, nobody has ever checked.
- Read the retention and training terms of the one your team relies on, and write down the answer so you can give it to a client who asks.
- Decide which conversations are never recorded – legal, HR, client finances – and say so at the start of the call.
None of this is an argument against using AI. It is an argument for knowing where the recording goes before the bot joins, rather than afterwards.
Worried this affects your business? Get a free 15-minute IT check – call Trends IT on 0485 011 911 or visit /contact/.