Nineteen eighty-four was meant to be a warning. Not a playbook for how we design modern work.

There’s a particular kind of meeting that leaves you wondering why you were there at all.

I joined one this morning, hosted by a major technology company. Almost two-hundred people were on the call, and it started late — a particular bugbear of mine, especially when it wastes a huge amount of other people’s time and quietly signals that they can all wait for someone else who isn’t properly prepared. Chat and comments were disabled, cameras were off, and ten slides were presented in a tightly controlled format. Then the call ended. No questions. No discussion.

Everyone had been gathered together, but there was no real interaction. The whole thing could have been recorded and shared afterwards with no real loss. It might have been better received that way.

The content itself was fairly straightforward. It was clearly intended to guide partners in a particular direction and avoid problems further down the line. That part made sense. What didn’t land so well was the tone. It felt more like instruction than collaboration, with just enough polish to make it presentable.

We often joke that a meeting could have been an email. In this case, it probably should have been. Or a short video that people could watch in their own time. Instead, it became a good example of how easy it is for communication to drift into something performative, where the act of broadcasting matters more than whether anyone is actually engaged.

When communication becomes a product

That meeting was a minor irritation. But at least I don’t work for a Silicon Valley social media giant.

Mark Zuckerberg is in the news again – because Meta is reported to be building an AI version of its leader to “connect with employees”. I can see the thinking behind: large organisations struggle with scale; Leaders cannot be everywhere; and consistent communication is difficult to maintain.

So, instead of effective leadership and delegation the answer (if you think like a tech bro) becomes automation. Create something that looks and sounds like you, deliver the message, and maintain a presence across the organisation.

And Sharon O’Dea summed it up in her calmly-delivered but razor-sharp LinkedIn post with this fantastic line:

“[Marshall] McLuhan said the medium is the message. And the message here — beamed directly into the faces of Meta’s workforce in HD, with accurate lip-sync — is: you are not worth my time. Your relationship with leadership is now a content type. A deliverable. A thing that can be optimised and scaled and A/B tested like everything else.”
– Sharon O’Dea, April 2026.

When leadership can be rendered, replayed and optimised, it changes the nature of the relationship. It starts to feel transactional.

Scaling presence vs. replacing it

I use AI tools every day. Microsoft Copilot is becoming genuinely useful, particularly for research and identifying action items. I also use ChatGPT extensively for writing and problem solving. Used well, these tools remove friction and save me time.

But tools don’t replace being present.

If I ever suggest sending an AI version of myself to a meeting, it will be a fairly strong signal that something has gone wrong. The value is rarely in delivering a perfectly formed message. It sits in the interaction around it – the questions, the pushback, the moments where the conversation goes slightly off-script and something more useful emerges.

There’s also a slightly uncomfortable implication. If someone can swap me out for an AI in that situation without losing anything, it is worth asking what I was contributing in the first place.

A gradual shift in what’s acceptable as normal

None of this comes from bad intent. The meeting this morning was trying to create clarity. The AI avatar is an attempt to deal with scale and time.

In isolation, these may be sensible decisions. But something feels off. Communication becomes more one-way. Leadership becomes something that can be produced and reused. Presence becomes less important.

And it’s happening gradually, which is probably why it passes without much comment.

A small course correction

There is a simple test that helps cut through most of this.

• If something doesn’t need to be a meeting, don’t make it one.
• If communication is one-way, be clear about it rather than presenting it as a conversation.
• If the answer to scale is to replace human interaction with an artificial version of it, it’s worth pausing to think about what is being lost.

It’s hard not to think of Orwell when this becomes the norm.