#meeting

I open my calendar in the morning and it’s already packed before I even start the day. Half the meetings overlap or get moved around last minute, so I’m constantly adjusting. I’m trying to keep up, but it feels like I spend more time managing my calendar than actually doing my job. It’s getting overwhelming in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’re in it. Do I just have bad luck or is this something others have encountered?

I just got my Monday morning 'business update' meeting invite. Should I be worried....yikes. I'm a remote employee too.

Anyone know all the details about the fight that happened during the meetup?

Email regarding Dans 1st quarter meeting 4/28. Hopefully some useful information. I’m not betting on it!

Newly appointed Dan has a meeting in November in which he said “AI, AI, AI , coffee” and said he’d be announcing his plan in a future meeting. Other than AI and 15,000 layoffs, what is his plan? Can anyone articulate it? Not being facetious, would really like to know.

I usually have my 1:1 every other Wednesday. My manager schedule 1:1 for tomorrow. Should I be concerned?

If it can tell me how to stop anyone at or above p3 from scheduling a meeting to "discuss tomorrows meeting."

Tomorrows meeting by the way is billed as "brief introduction..."

Maybe we can get a Kindergarten teacher to come in and give their TED talk on "introduction best practices?"

Assuming more layoffs tomorrow.

What are the “critical employee meetings” scheduled for apr 15.? Chat and call channels will have periods of unavailability

Bank leaders are all in San Antonio this week for strategy sessions. Could be a good or bad thing…anyone have insights?

I’ve never seen a company that is so top heavy. And notice how every VP is always in the same meetings with other VPs. What decision autonomy you have when everyone is in everyone’s business always.

There are meetings in random cities all over the world that everyone flocks to. And these “strategy sessions” do not drive anything other than poor decisions which require future pivots (and more Strat sessions).

What is going on with Honeywell?

i got cut by oracle in 2018... it was the textboo way to do it... there were rumors of layoffs for a few weeks (then a one to one with my manager)!

a month’s notice, time for handover meetings, plus sh-t trainings for finding a new job or setting up as a consultant. there was also the option of a redundancy pool, along with 6 months of redundancy pay. about 3K of us were cut at that time.

now it seems like when it’s 30K, oracle threw all that good practice out the window and told everyone to f off via email overnight, with all access immediately revoked.

i guess clay magouyrk is a sh-----d who models himself on the musk school of management, whatever that means. safra katz seemed like a decent person who had helped rehabilitate oracle’s corporate reputation to an extant (i have reservations abouth her too) only for it to go down the sh-t-drain again.

Never know what surprises Monday will bring. Another high-level departure or arrival? (Yet) another mandatory report? More mandatory meetings? There is no “normal” or “routine” and it’s absolutely draining.

Remember when that was a thing? Now they scheduled a mandatory meeting for Friday at 4 PM. Then they cancelled it at 3:55. Then they rescheduled it for Monday at 8 AM. That's the new culture.

Thoughts? Any ideas?

Sudden Friday afternoon meeting for my entire department! The day of reckoning has come! The end times are at hand!

We’re here to show up, stay aligned, and support Verizon and Frontier priorities, and we will continue doing that while maintaining BAU responsibilities.

That said, the current operating model is becoming highly inefficient due to significant duplication of effort. In many cases, it feels like multiple groups are running parallel versions of the same call, covering the same topics, and producing the same outputs independently rather than consolidating into a single streamlined effort.

From our perspective, this creates unnecessary repetition and makes it difficult to understand why workstreams are not being centralized or aligned into a single execution path. It also results in situations where multiple teams are effectively doing the same work in parallel rather than building once and scaling across groups.

We are also seeing limited alignment between operating approaches. Frontier teams bring established, proven ways of working that are efficient and well understood internally, but there does not currently appear to be a consistent mechanism to evaluate, adopt, or standardize those approaches across the broader Verizon-facing effort.

At the same time, we are being pulled between BAU responsibilities and multiple overlapping Verizon meetings, often without visibility into prioritization or coordination across groups. This creates conflicting expectations and makes it difficult to balance delivery without clearer structure.

We want to be clear—we are engaged and willing to support, but the current structure feels like “too many cooks in the kitchen,” and it’s not clear how decisions are being streamlined or who is accountable for reducing duplication and aligning execution.

We would appreciate clearer direction on meeting structure, decision ownership, and how leadership plans to consolidate parallel workstreams so teams can focus on execution rather than repetition, along with clearer prioritization across BAU and Verizon-led initiatives.

Very positive article, as it's nearly proof-of-concept that we're one step closer to getting executives completely replaced by AI bots.

• IBM's Dave McCann is using an AI agent to prepare for client meetings.
• He said "Digital Dave" helps him save five hours a week by eliminating 30-minute prep calls.
• Companies from tiny startups to the biggest firms are building AI agents to take on routine work.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-agent-saving-ibm-consulting-leader-hours-every-week-2026-4

By: Tim Paradis |
Apr 9, 2026, 1:06 PM CT

Dave McCann oversees thousands of humans, and also an AI agent he named after himself: Digital Dave.

One of the most valuable things it does is conduct research, including on the company's customers. That's a big help for McCann, who, as a global managing partner for transformation at IBM Consulting, is responsible for thousands of clients, including Nestlé, Ericsson, and Riyadh Air.

The agent — it's actually a collection of AI agents and assistants — scans McCann's calendar for client meetings and drafts a list of 10 things he needs to know for each one. The goal, McCann told Business Insider, was to free up time he and his staff spent preparing for the meetings.

Under the old setup, people on his team would put together a briefing document with him and typically have a 30-minute prep call ahead of the client meeting.

"All that's now gone," said McCann, who is tasked with helping transform the global IBM Consulting business, which has nearly 150,000 employees.

He generally talks with about 10 clients a week, so the agent saves him roughly five hours of prep time, McCann said.

"All the time I used to invest in client prep, I can now see more clients," he said.

Freeing up the team

McCann's research agent, which he and his team began building this past fall, is based on a tool that a group at the company had started to develop as part of an annual internal competition.

The agent reviews in-house data, what IBM and the client are doing in the market, external data, and account details — such as project status and services sold and purchased, McCann said. It can also identify industry trends and client needs by, for example, reviewing a firm's annual report and identifying a corresponding service IBM could provide.

Digital Dave also saves McCann's team time, he said, because the three or four staffers who used to spend hours pulling together insights for the prep calls are now free to do other work.

"It's not just about driving efficiencies, but it's really about transforming how work gets done," McCann said.

The agent's research abilities aren't limited to client reports. McCann has also begun using it to help him assess the hundreds of IBM Consulting partners he evaluates each year. The goal, he said, is making informed decisions and giving the execs good advice about their strengths and weaknesses as part of their performance evaluation.

McCann said the data the agent reviews can include the services execs sold and the profits they generated, the training they provided, and the impact they had on their teams' development. Before the agent, he said, his approach involved perhaps a dozen spreadsheets culminating in "the worst pivot table of your life."

Now, McCann said, all of the data goes into a model, and he can ask pointed questions and make queries about top performers in a particular parameter.

'That multiplier effect'

One benefit of building agents, McCann said, is that IBMers who develop them can share them with others on their team or more broadly within the company, "so it immediately creates that multiplier effect."

Many of the people who report to him have created agents, he said. There's a healthy competition, McCann said, to engineer the most robust digital sidekicks, especially because workers can build off of what their colleagues created.

Across industries, companies are developing AI agents to take on knowledge work — especially tedious tasks — once handled by humans. From one-person startups to consulting giants, firms are using agents across functions such as HR, IT, finance, communications, and training.

Agents can handle a range of functions, including gathering information, processing paperwork, drafting communications, taking meeting minutes, and pulling research. It's still early, but these systems are quickly becoming a major focus of corporate AI efforts as companies look to turn generative AI into something that can actually take work off employees' plates.

One challenge McCann sees with clients and building agents is having access to data. IBM Consulting's most advanced clients — maybe a Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 company — might have given access to data to several hundred people, but not to 5,000 people in their finance division or 10,000 people in HR, McCann said. Concerns about security and how to manage the innovation can be roadblocks.

Until you unlock the data, individual workers might be able to get more done, but "you don't get that multiplier effect of the productivity," he said.

For McCann's work, Digital Dave means that he gets critical time back on his calendar.

"I can have much more focused attention out with our clients and with our humans while I have the operations of the business now being run more digitally," he said.

My schedule gets flipped around constantly and I'm so tired of it. Meetings move all the time, deadlines jump forward, and it's messing with everything else in a way that makes my job much, much harder than it should be. Why the he-l is it so hard to stick to a set schedule?

Does everyone else have a mandatory housecalls town hall tomorrow?

Wonder what the agenda items will be?

If anyone knows later today, please share.

Anyone else notified of their all hands meeting getting pushed out?

Why do managers feel the need to drone endlessly about the obvious? Best I can tell, maybe 10% is actually instructive, the other 90% is just a ritual to make them feel important. People have stopped asking genuine questions, it’s too risky. It'll just extend the agony, and the answers won't come anyway.

Dunno about the rest of you out in cyberspace, but I made sure that I got my printed copy of the upcoming IBM Shareholders Business meeting and what the agenda is all about. It's an eyeopener for quite a lot of stuff and if you're an IBM shareholder you should insist on your written copy too or you'll miss some really interesting facts like

1. The executive committee under Alvind did NOT meet even ONCE in 2025 ! Sounds to me like they were paid for doing nothing but sitting around.

2. Krabanaugh is on the Executive retention plan from the mid-1990s but no other executives are on this cushy plan. Most of the rules of the plan are outdated and out of touch with today's reality. Kavanaugh has got his exit plan together and it's a gold mine.

3. The biggest corporate shareholders are Vanguard (10.03%), Blackrock Inc. (8.3%) and State Street Corp. (6.03%)....so, now you know who drives Alvind's limo and why. LOL !

4. these external IBM directors are making $365,000 on average but there's not a lot showing for that.

There's plenty of more interesting revelations (mostly financial), so if you are a shareholder, order your copy from your bank, your brokerage or your granny (if she is an IBM shareholder)...the schmucks who put this stuff together are trying desperately to convince (spelled "con") that IBM and it's thieving executives are providing value for $$$ through AI and hybrid cloud platforms. Oh really ?? (No mention of layoffs though)

Sector IT VP had one meeting tomorrow and one next week. Both got cancelled. Anyone knows anything about it?

• Meeting invites are going out Monday (Canada) and Tuesday (U.S.).
• Not sure if this is limited to my GBU or affects everyone at Oracle.
• VPs would have known on Friday...assuming managers get told Monday am or VPs do the work, and then everything is executed

I’d like to keep anonymous, so I’m not going to mention my GBU.

I already have a weekly 1:1 meeting scheduled on each Monday, and today I got my manager's email for a 1:1 on 04/20. I guess it's my time now.

The PIE group does meetings to help be anti-racist. Anyone been? What did you think?

Still getting new meetings scheduled like everything is normal. Maybe layoffs aren't happening? Why are we so sure it's the 31st?

Apparently psg 26+ are having a meeting Monday. Anyone know what’s up?

All Florida Clinics were told ten minutes ago that all employees must attend a business update meeting at noon today. Any info on what’s happening?

How did you like IT office hour? Got your questions answered?

Today we have the 'mysterious meeting'. Last day tomorrow... And there's many people impacted :/

They are answering their own BS questions... Not a single question from the audience. And I have never heard such absolute nonsense, complete gibberish

one off meeting with manager today, plus some unknowns, no other people currently invited who are working today in my group. Wish me luck. I did really well last year so i know its not performance related.

Could someone share what’s on the agenda or what main topics we’ll be covered during Wednesday’s mandatory all‑hands call? I’d like to know what to expect so I can be prepared ahead of time.

Wowzer. Cant believe they just dropped this in that meeting. For those who are not aware of what’s happening, all the details are spelled here ….See more

All my meetings are showing tentative for tomorrow and I can't switch to busy. Fingers crossed at this point that I wake up to a 15 minute meeting. Im prepared.

Great, don't take anonymous questions ahead of time, you will just delete them and also delete live questions.

Seriously why even attend.