Are We Sleepwalking, or Sprinting Into an “Always-Recording” Workplace?

Written by:
Ana Steele

Over the past 3 month, something subtle but massive shifted in how I work.

One, I left my big, fancy corporate product leadership role (a post for another time), and that shift opened the door to engaging with AI in a way I couldn’t have predicted.

I started participating in AI native product build outs, and in the process learned how to flip operating norms upside down. In the span of a few months, it’s become completely normal to see a little bot join our calls, quietly listening, transcribing, summarizing, and spitting out action items at the end. And let’s be honest: it is utterly amazing for me.

I, like a huge number of people, can see that 20–30% of my work that was previously eaten by admin efforts—taking notes, writing recaps, updating documents, creating tickets, chasing follow-ups—has suddenly been offloaded. The invisible labor that keeps organizations running (the “did you write that down?”, “who’s owning this?”, “where did we decide that?” work) is no longer strapped to the handful of meticulous humans that exist within most (all successful ones, at least) organizations.

As someone who spent years in senior staff roles making sure organizations actually run—thoroughness, persistence, follow-up—I know exactly how heavy that work can be. Even with strong personal systems and a bias toward organization, the simple act of listening, contributing, and note-taking while at the same time managing that information, distributing it, and leveraging it across silos, etc. consumes a large cognitive load.

On that dimension alone, always-on AI note-takers are a massive win. But that’s only half the story.

The other half is where things get murkier, more uncomfortable, and deeply consequential.

The New Normal: Everything is a Recording Opportunity

I believe we’re quickly heading toward a world where nearly every meaningful interaction could be recorded, transcribed, and persisted forever.

  • A 1:1 with your manager? Recorded.
  • A quick sync with a teammate? Recorded.
  • A spontaneous brainstorm? Recorded.
  • A call with your mom about upcoming travel? Quite possibly… recorded.

I see the convenience of this—especially for those of us who are constantly juggling commitments across work and life. I have school aged children, a spouse that works full-time, aging parents on BOTH sides, the hope and dream that we can get a vacation organized for Spring Break even though we are both to exhausted at the end of the day to hash out the details...the list goes on for most of us. Personally, the need to extract actionable information from conversations, map expectations (what others owe me, what I owe them), and then route all that into working queues is just as real in my personal life as in my professional one.

So yes, I can absolutely imagine a world where I’d love a personal note-taker in a call with my family, but right now I will settle for just at work, just so I don’t drop the ball on logistics, deadlines, or commitments.

But convenience is not the only, or even the primary, lens that matters here.

The Organizational Blind Spot: Risk, Compliance, and Shadow AI

From the perspective of my last several organizational leadership roles, especially when I think of the organizations of scale I operated within, the proliferation of AI meeting tools has clearly outpaced the systems meant to keep things safe and compliant.

  • Enterprise recording tools (Zoom, Teams, Meet, etc.) often sit behind configurable policies and security postures that have been negotiated with legal, compliance, and security teams.
  • Individual AI tools—browser-based, extensions, personal bots (Granola, Otter.ai, Fireflies)—often don’t.

And despite this, organizations are not turning off the taps. Even when centralized controls exist, they’re rarely enforced in ways that stop individuals from adopting personal tools that live completely outside the organization’s traditional security posture.

So now you have:

  • Sensitive conversations being piped into third-party systems the enterprise doesn’t truly control
  • Intellectual property living who-knows-where
  • Unclear or non-existent policies around retention, access, and deletion
  • A patchwork of contracts, terms of service, and data-processing agreements that most employees have never read—and many legal teams haven’t fully mapped

In talking with legal and risk teams, one theme surfaces again and again: we do not yet know the full shape or magnitude of the risk. There isn’t enough precedent. There aren’t enough lawsuits. There isn’t enough case law.

And yet the behavior is normalizing.

The Duality: Surveillance vs. Goldmine

Everyone paying any attention to the AI ecosystem knows that the data from these meetings are a goldmine.

All those conversations—decisions being made, dissatisfaction being voiced, customer insights casually dropped, ideas half-formed on a random Tuesday—contain enormous untapped value.

This is the promise side of the equation:

  • Rich data to train better internal models
  • Clearer organizational memory
  • More reliable handoffs and fewer dropped balls
  • The ability to “replay” context across teams and time
  • Not being called out in a meeting you were spending quality spacing out in

But you don’t get this goldmine for free.

Employees increasingly live with a sense—sometimes explicit, sometimes just under the surface—that they are always being recorded. Even if they don’t start the recording, someone else may drop a note-taker into the call. Even if they opt out, that doesn’t mean others will.

That creates a new form of ambient workplace surveillance, and most organizations have not yet reckoned with what that really means for:

  • Trust
  • Psychological safety
  • Candid disagreement and dissent
  • Inclusion and equity (who feels safe being recorded, and who doesn’t?)

For many employees, the questions are becoming:

  • Is my company always listening?
  • Who has access to what I say?
  • How long does that access last?
  • Can this be used against me in a performance, legal, or HR context?

Those are not minor questions.

Culture, Power, and the Shape of Work

When everything is potentially recorded, it doesn’t just change compliance and risk—it changes behavior.

People edit themselves.People share less.People take fewer risks in what they say out loud.

Or, in the best-case scenario, organizations rise to the occasion and intentionally reshape culture and practice:

  • Clear norms about when recording is appropriate
  • Easy, respected ways to say “no, this should not be recorded”
  • Transparent policies about who can access what, and for how long
  • Guardrails on how recordings can and cannot be used (e.g., not as a backdoor surveillance mechanism)

But we’re not there yet, as a norm.Right now, we’re in a messy in-between state:

  • Productivity is obvious and immediate
  • Risk is unclear and lagging
  • Culture is being reshaped on the fly

A Few of the Big Open Questions that Feel Especially Unresolved:

  • How cautious can organizations realistically afford to be?
    If you slow-roll or ban these tools, do you fall behind competitively? Do your employees just adopt them anyway in the shadows?
  • What’s the right balance between individual choice and enterprise control?
    If an employee chooses to use a personal AI recorder, but the content is about company strategy or customer data, who owns that choice? Who owns that risk?
  • What happens when the lawsuits start coming?
    We don’t yet know how courts will treat consent, expectations of privacy, or downstream use of transcribed data in this new environment.
  • Are we underestimating the human impact?
    Will the long-term effect be a quieter, more guarded workplace? Or will strong norms and transparent governance make people feel safer, not less?

I don’t think anyone has all the answers yet—certainly not in a way that’s fully battle-tested in court, across industries, and at global scale. I have opinions, and I am curious about yours.

Why This Matters Now

We are not in a hypothetical future. These tools are here. They are running today, on calls happening right now, across organizations of every size.

And the gap between:

  • how easy they are to adopt
  • and how prepared organizations are to manage the consequences

…is widening every week.

This is exactly the phase where a lot of long-term norms get accidentally locked in. Decisions made now—about policies, defaults, norms, and culture—will be very hard to unwind later.

So the question isn’t just:

“Should we use AI meeting tools?”

The question really is:

Given that we are using them, what responsibilities do we now have—to our people, our customers, and our future selves?

Your Turn: How Are You Dealing With This?

I’m genuinely curious how this looks from your side.

  • If you’re in legal, risk, or compliance:
    How are you assessing and governing AI recording tools right now? What keeps you up at night?
  • If you’re in leadership or operations:
    How are you weighing productivity gains against cultural and ethical concerns?
  • If you’re an individual contributor or manager:
    How do you feel about always-on recording at work? Empowered? Watched? Relieved? All of the above?

I would be happy to share my thoughts, use the contact form on the site, or DM me on LinkedIn if you want to talk and are willing to share your perspective too.

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