As AI becomes more ingrained in our daily lives, many online meeting platforms, like Zoom and WebEx, are offering AI meeting assistants. These meeting assistants utilize transcripts, chat interactions, and shared files to enhance the virtual meeting experience by creating meeting summaries, prompting meeting questions, and making smart recordings.
The Office of Academic & Career Success (OACS) recommends following the AI-related guidance and policies of your school or college, division, or unit. If AI meeting assistants are an allowed technology in your area, please review the following resources and considerations before using them.
FERPA-approved AI Meeting Assistants
If you’re planning to use an AI meeting assistant in an individual student meeting, it’s imperative that you follow FERPA guidelines. Currently, there are only two FERPA-approved platforms for using AI meeting assistants at UW–Madison:
Each of the links above contains in-depth information how how to use the tool. Use those guides to get started. If you want to learn more about student data and AI in general, explore the Registrar’s guide on FERPA and AI.
Before Using an AI Meeting Assistant
Reflect on these questions
Before deciding to use an AI meeting assistant in individual meetings, reflect on the following questions:
- What goal(s) do I have for using this tool in the meeting?
- What benefits does the tool offer, and what are the potential impacts of using the tool in 1:1 meetings with students?
- How might the presence of the tool alter my communication or influence what the student shares during the meeting?
- How will I explain the tool to the student, and how will I obtain their consent before using it?
Understand accuracy and bias
AI meeting assistants and summarization tools are trained on models that contain bias, so the output of these tools may contain bias as well.
These tools also make errors in their summarizations. Even if technically accurate, the tool can lack context to the extent that it does not provide a true picture of the tone and content of the meeting.
Therefore, any record created by an AI tool should be reviewed, corrected, and validated by a human before sharing.
Best Practices for Using an AI Meeting Assistant
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Obtain consent
Always seek explicit consent from students before enabling the AI meeting assistant.
Sample Language: “Are you familiar with AI meeting assistants? I’ve found them helpful in my advising appointments as they can provide a meeting summary, answer questions about the meeting, and record our conversation for future reference. How would you feel about me using one today? Do you have any questions?”
Option to disable
Be prepared to disable any or all AI meeting assistant features if requested by a student, or when sensitive or private information is being shared.
Auto-enabling
Do not enable the AI meeting assistant before a meeting formally begins, as it will transcribe all conversations, even those unrelated to the meeting content.
Review and edit
If you choose to share or copy text from an AI-generated summary carefully review and edit the summary to ensure accuracy and context before sharing.
Consider your capacity
Do I have the time and capacity to carefully review and edit the AI-generated summary before entering it into Advising Gateway?
Review the content
Assess the content and context of the AI-generated summary. Does all of it need to be entered into Advising Gateway? Ask yourself:
- Is this information helpful to other advisors?
- Will this be helpful for future reference?
Additional Resources
If you’re interested in learning more about the use of artificial intelligence and its impact and use at the university, there are several places you can look to learn more.
- Generative AI in Teaching, Center for Teaching, Learning & Mentoring
- Exploring AI in Teaching, Center for Teaching, Learning & Mentoring
- Considerations for Using AI in the Classroom, L&S Instructional Design Collaborative
- Generative Artificial Intelligence, Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards
- Microsoft Copilot, UW–Madison Information Technology