Reimagining Meetings and AI: A Conversation with Dr. Rebecca Hinds

By Dr. Rebecca Hinds, Gabby Burlacu, and Allie Blaising 

One aspect often missing from the AI conversation is that we’re introducing these tools into organizations and cultures with long-standing challenges—issues AI can either help solve or make worse. This has been shown in research associating AI implementation with burnout and the potential to exacerbate bias. Dr. Rebecca Hinds has extended this thinking to focus on a dysfunctional yet pervasive aspect of our work experience: meetings. In her new book Your Best Meeting Ever, Dr. Hinds explores the intersection between AI and meetings, and identifies what leading organizations are doing to lighten the load of their people and drive true value with AI. 
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Dr. Hinds is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work, conducting research that challenges outdated management playbooks and inspires leaders to rethink and redesign how work gets done. From 2022 to 2025, Rebecca founded and led the Work Innovation Lab at Asana to explore bold, research-driven solutions to the biggest challenges in today’s workplace. In 2025, she launched the Work AI Institute at Glean where she partners with leading experts to help organizations transform their work with AI.
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The Upwork Research Institute engaged Dr. Hinds in a Q&A discussion as part of Upwork’s Reimagining Work, which is a lecture series designed to provide a forum for expert practitioners and academics to foster the exchange of views on the present and future of work. During the conversation she shared her perspective on where we’ve gone wrong with meetings… and how AI can help, if approached correctly. 
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1. Allie: We’ve all felt the pain of having too many meetings on our calendars. Why, in your view, have meetings become so dysfunctional?
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Rebecca: Meetings have become dysfunctional largely because we use them as a knee-jerk default solution for everything (communication, coordination, and collaboration), rather than first asking whether a meeting is the right tool for the task at hand. A big driver behind this is “visibility bias." As humans, we associate visibility with value. While much of our most important work is invisible (deep thinking, mentoring a teammate, working through a hard problem), meetings are highly visible. So too is a conference room full of people. Or a face gesturing into a Zoom window. 

In large part because of this visibility bias, meetings become a way to signal productivity, regardless of whether anything meaningful happens in the room. And, thus, meetings often multiply, not necessarily because they produce better outcomes, but because they look like productivity.

2. Gabby: What is the relationship between AI and more functional, optimized meetings?
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Rebecca: AI has the potential to make our meetings significantly better, or significantly worse. In many ways, the lowest hanging fruit is using AI to automate the drudgery: scheduling, transcription, summarization, capturing action items. A step further is using AI as an intelligent advisor, analyzing dimensions of our meetings such as talk time, sentiment, and participation patterns to help teams understand whether their meetings are effective.

The boldest frontier is AI becoming an active participant in our meetings. There are some valuable roles for AI to play in our meetings, flagging when a conversation is going in circles, or playing devil's advocate to stress-test a decision. What concerns me, though, is the other end of that spectrum: people sending a digital twin to a meeting instead of showing up themselves. In and outside of meetings, I worry a lot about cognitive offloading, or deploying AI to do things we should be doing ourselves—the listening, the judgment, the human presence, the wrestling with ideas. Often that friction is where our most important and valuable work happens. It's often where deep relationships form, where creativity is fostered, and where employees develop a sense of ownership and commitment over their work.

3. Allie: The “toggle tax” is a particularly interesting reality of our work day– one that many people probably don’t even think about. What has your research shown about the ramifications of too much “toggling”?
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Rebecca: The toggle tax is one of the most underappreciated drains on modern productivity. Research shows that workers at Fortune 500 companies can toggle between apps and tabs up to 1,200 times per day, and it can take them 23 minutes or more to return to the original task. The cost is staggering.

What makes this particularly interesting and important is that it upends a common assumption about employee experience: that more choice is better. In reality, workers want a standardized tool stack and top-down direction. They're overwhelmed by work living across multiple platforms, channels, and inboxes. In too many cases, AI is fueling the toggle tax. Every new AI tool that enters the workplace, however powerful, is often yet another destination workers are expected to navigate to—another tab, another context switch, another interruption between them and the task at hand.
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4. Gabby: With three years of rapid AI adoption behind us, the Upwork Research Institute has identified a critical distinction: adopting AI isn’t the same as creating value with AI. What are organizations that are truly capturing value from AI doing differently when it comes to engaging and empowering their workforce?
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Rebecca: The most effective organizations are balancing top-down and bottom-up change. When it comes to top-down change, they're establishing clear policies and principles. As well, leaders are visibly using the technology themselves, signaling that this isn't just a mandate handed down from above. In terms of bottom-up change, they're activating AI champions and internal advocates who can build grassroots fluency and make AI adoption feel more like a collective movement.
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They're also treating this as more than a technological change. They're giving employees clarity in terms of what this might mean for their roles and jobs. They are investing in training and upskilling. Critically, they're also thinking carefully about what should remain distinctly human at the core of work, and they're willing to pull back on AI when it becomes clear that automation is degrading rather than enhancing the outcome.
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Additionally, they're thinking holistically about what success looks like, anchoring on core business outcomes rather than vanity metrics and output proxies like lines of code written or number of blog posts published.
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And finally, they're staying genuinely curious. The organizations capturing the most value from AI are experimenting thoughtfully, learning in public, and viewing failure as an important and inevitable part of the process.
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5. Allie: What are you most excited about as AI becomes increasingly integrated into the operations of how we work? 
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Rebecca: What excites me most is the potential to use AI to improve how teams collaborate. So much of the current conversation, and so much of how the technology is being deployed, treats AI as an individual productivity tool. That can be useful in some cases but if we overindex on individual productivity, we risk doing so at the expense of team and organizational outcomes.
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There's a concept called the "tragedy of the commons" that captures this tension well: what's rational for the individual can be harmful to the collective. We're already seeing versions of this play out, such as when people use AI to generate low-quality, high-volume content that adds friction for everyone else downstream.
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On the flip side, when AI is aimed at the team level (rather than the individual level), it can improve how all of us work. Should this be a meeting or an async update? Does this decision need more voices or fewer? Is this team in the right collaboration mode for the task at hand? Whereas collaboration has traditionally been very difficult to measure, AI gives us deeper insight into how we work together and how we might systematically improve it.
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About Dr. Rebecca Hinds 

Rebecca Hinds, author of Your Best Meeting Ever, is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University. Her research is consistently featured in top-tier publications like Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired, and more. She is a trusted advisor to companies navigating the challenges of modern work-from meeting overload and hybrid dysfunction to the messy realities of AI adoption and organizational change.
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About Allie Blaising

Allie Blaising is a Senior Lead User Experience Researcher at Upwork, where she leads customer research that shapes design and business decisions across multiple verticals, with a recent focus on Small Business Growth and Generative AI product initiatives. She holds a Master’s in Science from University of Pennsylvania.