I have a soft spot for LinkedIn polls. They’re a small ritual that lets me observe how a community reacts to the questions shaping our professional lives. My latest poll touched on a topic I’m personally grappling with: the use of AI assistants during meetings.
When I run polls, I never vote myself. But here is the answer I would have given. I don’t use AI assistants in meetings, and I’m uncomfortable when I discover them in calls and meetings I’ve been invited to. Not for ideological reasons, but because something in the dynamic feels subtly unbalanced.
These tools often appear without warning, as if they had always belonged in the virtual room. Some are privacy-by-design, many are not. And I can’t shake the feeling of an invisible presence sitting in the background. A hidden guest that listens, records, and analyses without any human accountability attached.
My real concern isn’t the technology itself. It’s the assumption that its presence no longer requires explanation. Too often there is limited transparency about who receives the data, how it is processed, and what persists long after the meeting ends.
That raises a larger question, one I keep coming back to: What does digital etiquette look like in 2025? Do we simply accept whatever the tool makes possible? Or do we still have the right (and the responsibility) to negotiate how our digital spaces should feel?
I worry that we are losing the habit of asking permission. It used to be obvious that sensitive conversations required shared rules. Today, speed and convenience seem to eclipse consent. And yet consent is not bureaucracy; it’s respect. It acknowledges presence. It signals that a conversation is not a resource to be harvested, but a moment shared between people. When we skip that step, something shifts in the relationship. Quietly, but unmistakably.
If you’re curious, here’s the link to the poll (you can vote until December, 16). But the real issue goes far beyond percentages or votes. It touches something deeply human: how we react, how we adapt, and how we negotiate presence when technology becomes an unseen participant in our conversations. It reminds us that innovation is not only a matter of efficiency. It is also about boundaries, rituals, and the subtle, essential art of taking care of our shared spaces.
