The future is … sending AI avatars to meetings for us, says Zoom boss | Artificial intelligence (AI)

Zoom users in the not-too-distant future could send AI avatars to attend meetings in their absence, the company’s chief executive has suggested, delegating the drudge-work of corporate life to a system trained on their own content.

Such a system would be “five or six years” away, Eric Yuan told The Verge magazine, but he added that the company was working on nearer-term technologies that could bring it closer to reality.

“Let’s assume, fast-forward five or six years, that AI is ready,” Yuan said. “AI probably can help for maybe 90% of the work, but in terms of real-time interaction, today, you and I are talking online. So, I can send my digital version, you can send your digital version.”

Using AI avatars in this way could free up time for less career-focused choices, Yuan, who also founded Zoom, added. “You and I can have more time to have more in-person interactions, but maybe not for work. Maybe for something else. Why do we need to work five days a week? Down the road, four days or three days. Why not spend more time with your family?”

Ultimately, he suggests, each user would have their own “large language model” (LLM), the underlying technology of services such as ChatGPT, which would be trained on their own speech and behaviour patterns, to let them generate extremely personalised responses to queries and requests.

Such systems could be a natural progression from AI tools that already exist today. Services such as Gmail can summarise and suggest replies to emails based on previous messages, while Microsoft Teams will transcribe and summarise video conferences, automatically generating a to-do list from the contents.

Other services will generate realistic video avatars and plausible generated speech from a text transcript. Put them all together, and it could feel like an AI avatar is tantalisingly close.

However, the AI expert Simon Willison dismissed the idea that such technology was imminent or even possible. “My fundamental problem with this whole idea is that it represents pure AI science fiction thinking,” he said. “Just because an LLM can do a passable impression of someone doesn’t mean it can actually perform useful ‘work’ on behalf of that person.

“LLMs are useful tools for thought. They are terrible tools for delegating decision making to. That’s currently my red line for using them: any time someone outsources actual decision-making authority to an opaque random number generator is a recipe for disaster.”

Others expressed concern at the blurring of real and fake. Steve Won, the chief product officer of the security and identity company 1Password, pointed to Yuan’s claims as evidence that online verification was about to become significantly more complicated.

“How many digital twins can I have at any given time? This is like a Max Headroom situation,” Won said on Tuesday, referring to the television series from the 80s.

“The fact that the leading virtual communication app in the world is thinking: ‘Yeah, it’s totally fine to have inauthentic conversations, representing and making business decisions’ – I think this makes it a burning problem that we’re going to have to solve.”