Meetings In The AI Era: Kayak Founder Delivers A Game Plan

InnovationAIMeetings In The AI Era: Kayak Founder Delivers A Game PlanByJohn Werner,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I am an MIT Senior Fellow & Lecturer, 5x-founder & VC investing in AIFollow AuthorJun 03, 2026, 11:51am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Paul EnglishKatherine TaylorThe idea of expediting the common corporate meeting has been caroming around for a while in tech media. There’s short-form analysis of participant sentiment, in the revered “scrum circle” of engineers. Now, Paul English, the founder of Kayak, has given us a book on how to innovate the common meeting for today.Paul English is someone with MIT roots: he’s a cofounder of Boston Venture Studio, besides being a famed investor, lecturer, and leader. He has a lot to say about innovation, and entrepreneurship, and business.The Pain PointsA blurb on the book announcement web site sums up part of English’s argument: that meetings can be good.“Meetings don't have to be dreaded time-sinks. They can become engines of trust, strategy, innovation, and performance and even, dare we say, fun.”The problem, English contends, is that often, these happenings suffer from the same kinds of problems that make them a net negative for those feeling trapped inside of the convention. He starts with the statistic that 55 million meetings are held each day across America (no word on how many of them feature mandatory singing) and then estimates that the economic impact is around $180 billion, or roughly 3% of GDP.Then he leads to the shocker: 71% of meetings, English estimates, are “unproductive.” That’s a lot.“A typical 1,000-person company wastes almost $10 million a year on bad meetings,” English told me in an exclusive quote around this book’s release. “But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that bad meetings destroy morale.”MORE FOR YOUI would concur that...