I wrote impeccable minutes.
What happens when a tool replicates the thing you earned — and what that’s actually worth.
In the last post, I told you about a colleague whose meeting minutes were immaculate - and about the jealousy that produced in me. Read that here.
What I didn’t tell you was the other half of the story.
What I had instead
For years — decades — I took minutes the old-fashioned way.
Which is to say: I was there. Actually there. Listening with the particular discipline of someone who knows they’ll need to reconstruct the conversation afterward. Following the thread of an argument across three interruptions and a tangent about something that happened last quarter. Holding the context of what was said against the context of what wasn’t, and knowing the difference.
I have a specific kind of memory for meetings. Not photographic — I forget names, I forget the last personal thing anyone told me, I lose track of ordinary details with impressive consistency. But put me in a room where something is happening and I will remember it. The decisions made and the ones deferred. The moment the energy shifted. The thing someone said that everyone pretended not to hear.
The minutes I produced from that presence were, I think, genuinely good. Not just accurate — alive. They captured not just what was decided but the shape of how it was decided. The context that would matter six months later when someone asked why.
That was the skill. Years of it. A discipline built from genuine engagement, from caring about what happened in rooms, from believing that presence had value.
And then an app replicated the output in thirty seconds.
The jealousy I’m not proud of
The truth is the jealousy wasn’t really about efficiency. It was about something harder to admit.
He got credit for something he didn’t earn. And I — who had earned it, genuinely, year after year in room after room — watched that happen and felt the particular fury of someone whose currency has been devalued overnight without anyone asking permission.
The organisation didn’t notice the difference. That was the thing. The minutes looked the same. The outcome was identical. The absence of the skill that produced them was completely invisible to everyone who mattered.
Which forces a question I wasn’t ready to ask at the time.
Was the organisation ever paying for the skill? Or was it always just paying for the minutes?
The uncomfortable reframe
Part of what I was protecting — when I felt that fury, when I watched him put it on his resume — wasn’t just professional pride in genuine work. It was an identity. The person who was present. The person whose minutes were worth reading. The person who understood what happened in rooms because she was actually in them.
AI didn’t threaten my output. It threatened the story I told about myself through my output.
And that’s a different thing entirely.
Because the story — the presence, the discipline, the specific quality of attention I brought to those rooms — that was real. It produced real things beyond the minutes. It produced relationships, and trust, and the particular authority that comes from being someone who actually knows what happened. It produced judgment. It produced the ability to read a room because I’d spent years learning how rooms worked.
None of that is in the minutes. None of that is replicable by an app.
The oaf got a promotion. Fine. Maybe the organisation was right that the minutes were what they needed, and he delivered the minutes. Maybe that’s a reasonable transaction.
But he didn’t get the years in the room. He didn’t get the judgment. He didn’t get the thing that produced the minutes before there was an app to produce them for him.
The question AI forces isn’t was my skill worth anything?
It’s what was my skill actually for?
And the answer, it turns out, isn’t the minutes.
What presence was actually for
The minutes were evidence of presence. They were never the point of it.
The point was the room. The understanding of what happened there. The relationships built across years of actually showing up, actually listening, actually caring about the outcome enough to hold it carefully afterward.
That can’t be put on a resume in the way he put his app on his resume. It accumulates differently. It shows up in different ways — in who trusts you, in who calls you when something matters, in the judgment you bring to situations that can’t be resolved by an AI tool because nobody’s thought to transcript them yet.
AI replicated the output. It couldn’t replicate the person who produced it.
And the person — it turns out — was always worth more than the minutes.
The skill was never the output. The output was just how the skill showed its face.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.