Artificial intelligence is listening to your meetings. Watch what you say.

Tiffany N. Lewis was worried she was being duped. A potential client had reached out about working with her digital marketing agency on a pro-bono basis, but his message went straight to spam. Then he blew off several scheduled meetings with Lewis. Was he a fraud?

- Ann-Marie Alcántara

When the client asked her to meet again, Lewis added him to a call she was already on with her assistant. Before he joined, Lewis joked: "Is he, like, a Nigerian prince?"

Despite the scammy red flags, he turned out to be a legitimate person. Lewis was relieved—until she realized her new client had received a full summary of the call in his inbox, including her "Nigerian prince" remark. She was running an AI notetaker the whole time.

"I was very lucky that the person I was working with had a good sense of humor," said Lewis, who lives in Stow, Ohio.

AI is listening in on your work meetings—including the parts you don't want anyone to hear. Before attendees file in, or when one colleague asks another to hang back to discuss a separate matter, AI notetakers may pick up on the small talk and private discussions meant for a select audience, then blast direct quotes to everyone in the meeting.

Nicole and Tim Delger run a Nashville branding firm called Studio Delger. After one business meeting late last year, the couple received a summary from Zoom's AI assistant that was decidedly not work-related.

"Studio discussed the possibility of getting sandwich ingredients from Publix," one bullet point said. Another key takeaway: "Don't like soup."

Their client never showed up to the meeting, and the studio had spent the time talking about what to make for lunch.

"That was the first time it had caught a private conversation," Nicole said. Fortunately the summary didn't go to the client.