Back when I was a reporter, an old hack once told me never to ask my best questions from the floor of a press conference or similar event. His thinking was that everyone there gets to hear the answer and can use that info. Instead, try to nab a speaker one-to-one afterwards, even if it means walking alongside them as they leave a venue. Then you have that answer to yourself. 

 What does this have to do with the way you might use GenAI tools? 

 All of us must have noticed how many people use tools for things such as summarising calls on Zoom, Teams and the like. You might well do it already. 

 This is different to transcription in the cloud, in that it’s about conveying the most important things that are said. 

 I even heard about someone last week who dials in to two-hour board meetings and then takes five minutes to read a Fathom or Otter.ai summary at the end, so he can use the saved 115 minutes for other things. 

 Now for my problem with all that. 

 The director’s cut 

 When everyone is using the same tools to summarise the same events – meetings, client calls, job interviews, whatever – they are all working to the same narrow set of information. 

 There definitely is a place for summaries. But like the journalist getting their exclusive answer or a filmmaker looking at what used to be known as the cutting room floor to assemble a ‘director’s cut’ – there is value in what other people have missed. 

 They zig. You zag. 

 Know what the summary says. But profit from that one important piece of detail or colour that everyone is now assuming has no value. The right details really do matter. 

 One final thing: this isn’t just about GenAI and similar. There have been summaries of things like conferences or board meetings forever. It’s just that now technology is making summaries easier than ever, and people think it’s the smartest thing they can do during yet another meeting. Sometimes it’s really not. However much you hate that meeting.