Shopify’s now AI accurately predicts the cost of that crappy business meeting

Pandemic or not, long meetings are a norm in every organisation, and we all take them for granted, and in most cases the discussion can last more than the time they are scheduled for. Recently, Canadian E-Commerce company Shopify decided to add a novel “cost calculator” to the calendar app in an attempt to shame employees for conducting "pointless meetings."

According to a Bloomberg report, this new tool calculates the estimated cost of any meeting which has about two-three employees - depending on the average compensation data across roles and disciplines.

The more attendees in a meeting the higher the cost gets. A typical 30-minute meeting with two to three employees costs between $700 and $1,600. Similarly, if a C-suite executive like Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian is part of the meeting, the cost spikes above $2,000.

This tool has been a part of the e-commerce platform's year-long initiative to curb unnecessary meetings, and it’s an interesting way to really understand just how expensive random and often relatively pointless meetings can be for a company. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that the company eliminated "all recurring meetings with more than two people and started discouraging meetings on Wednesdays."

With this move, the company plans to end 322,000 hours of meetings and 474,000 discrete events this year.

"No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner. But lots and lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision. The goal of this thing is to show you that time is money. If you have to spend it, you think about it," Nejatian was quoted as saying to Bloomberg in an interview.

In just five months since this was implemented, Shopify saw a 14 per cent decline in average time spent in meetings per employee in comparison to the same period last year.

Locked in our homes, meetings were a common activity during the Covid-19 pandemic. While a section of people believed it was a waste of time, many ended up spending hours in meetings.

During the pandemic in September 2021, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma revealed that he spent seven hours and 45 minutes on his longest Zoom call ever.

The same year in June, businessman Anand Mahindra, who also attended most of his meetings on Zoom, said that he was amazed to find out that jumping from one call to another can be considered a "power move.

The era of work-from-home might have come to an end, but the endless meetings continue to haunt employees.

According to research conducted by University of North Carolina professor Steven Rogelberg, who studied meetings for two decades, non-critical meetings waste a total of about $100 million a year at big organisations, and that’s a lot of hidden cost that now can be identified, quantified, and recouped.