“Sitting in a meeting and not contributing is more impersonal than letting a bot attend in your place.” — Andy Abramson, Founder & CEO, Comunicano

In a wide-ranging and fast-moving conversation with Technology Reseller News publisher Doug Green, veteran communications strategist Andy Abramson delivers a provocative take on the state—and future—of meetings in the AI era.

Abramson, Founder and CEO of Comunicano and a decades-long force in telecom PR and strategic communications, begins by challenging the conventional wisdom that in-person meeting attendance is always better. Responding to a Washington Post article about AI bots attending meetings on behalf of humans, Abramson argues that automation isn’t the enemy of productivity—in fact, it might finally deliver on it.

“Most meetings are dominated by three or four people,” says Abramson. “The rest are scrolling Instagram, shopping online—or worse. Bots can attend in their place, and with the right tools, those people can get more value from the meeting in 10 minutes than they would in 60.”

Doug Green probes the implications: Is this the end of collaboration? Or its rebirth? Abramson believes AI will actually foster better group dynamics. With meeting notes, summaries, searchable transcripts, and VCons (virtual conversation containers), information is more accessible than ever, and participation can be asynchronous but no less impactful. He points out that voice dominance and politics often muffle valuable ideas in large group settings. Streamlining who attends—based on contribution, not hierarchy—can amplify creativity and productivity.

Drawing on his background in sports and media, Abramson outlines a playbook for smarter meetings: track engagement like player stats, rotate voices for freshness, and cut people loose when their time is better spent elsewhere. He even likens the future of meetings to modern coaching—leaders must evolve into facilitators who optimize team contribution rather than merely host a room.

The conversation also touches on the origins of online collaboration in the 1980s, with Abramson offering a vivid tour of early digital bulletin boards and a pre-Internet proto-social network culture. This historical perspective leads to a discussion of VCon, a now-emerging open-source standard that encapsulates conversations—recordings, transcripts, summaries, and context—into portable, interoperable, and privacy-aware containers.

“VCon is the PDF of conversations,” says Abramson. “It’s portable, secure, and creates an immutable record of everything that was said, decided, and assigned.”

Green and Abramson close by offering practical advice for leaders: use the data from your meetings—who spoke, who didn’t—to refine participation, increase engagement, and free up your team’s most valuable resource: time.

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