From Human Gatherings to Human–Agent Meetings: Rethinking Small Group and Team Collaboration in the Age of AI

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is no longer merely supporting teamwork from the margins. By entering meetings directly as a participant, AI may be changing the way teams function. This commentary argues that note-taking bots, real-time summarizers, and emerging facilitative agents are altering core meeting dynamics. This may include meeting attendance, participation, memory, accountability, and authority. In doing so, AI challenges long-standing assumptions about team boundaries and raises new questions about trust, leadership, entitativity, and human dependence on machine-generated records. Meetings are therefore not just another site of technological adoption, but a critical arena for understanding human–agent collaboration as it unfolds in real time. Rather than treating AI as a neutral administrative tool, this commentary positions AI in meetings as a consequential shift for both meeting science and broader teams’ research.