The meeting that should have been a prompt.

We all know the meeting that should have been an email.

That meeting has a cousin now. It is worse. It is the meeting that should have been a prompt.

It is the meeting that should have been a prompt.

Six smart people. One whiteboard. Sixty minutes spent producing a first draft that a language model would have produced in thirty seconds. Then everyone leaves tired and calls it collaboration. Someone takes a photo of the whiteboard. Nobody ever looks at that photo again.

I have run that meeting. Plenty of times. Nobody does it on purpose. We do it because for most of our careers, the blank page was expensive, and a room full of people was the only way to fill it.

Worse, I have called that meeting. I have been the guy at the whiteboard, marker in hand, shouting "No bad ideas!" while six people stared at me and silently produced no ideas at all. I once burned an entire afternoon naming a product. We landed on a name I had scribbled in my notebook before the meeting started. Six people. Four hours. One lap back to my notebook. That was the day I started brainstorming with AI before anyone else got a calendar invite.

That is no longer true.

Do the math once

Six people for an hour is six hours of work. Not one hour. Six. Finance would never approve six hours of senior salary for a stapler. A meeting, though? Sure. Grab a pastry.

If those six hours produce a list of 20 campaign ideas, a rough outline, or a first pass at messaging, you paid senior salaries for a job a prompt does before your coffee cools.

Meetings are the purest proof.

Brainstorm with the robot first

These days I don't run the group brainstorm. I gave it up, like carbs, except this one actually stuck.

Instead, I brainstorm with AI first. Before anyone gets a calendar invite, I throw the problem at the machine and spar with it. Fifty angles. Twenty terrible ones. Three that are annoyingly good. Half the time, that one session answers the question so completely that the meeting never needs to happen. Nobody misses it. Nobody has ever written a sad poem about a canceled meeting.

When a meeting does earn its spot, it is a kickoff, not a think tank. Here is the problem. Here is what good looks like. Here is the deadline. Now go away and think. Alone. With snacks, ideally.

Why the old brainstorm was rigged

Here is what I eventually noticed about the classic group brainstorm. It is not a meeting of minds. It is a talent show for extroverts.

It is a talent show for extroverts.

The extroverts talk first, talk loudest, and talk often. Not because their ideas are better. Because they are willing to say them out loud before the coffee kicks in. Meanwhile the introverts sit there cringing, nodding politely, and sitting on the best idea in the room until the drive home. By then the whiteboard is erased, and the direction was set twenty minutes ago by whoever most enjoys the sound of their own voice. (I say this with love. I am frequently that voice.)

Sending people off to think on their own fixes this. The quiet ones get room to think. The loud ones get room to think before they talk, which is a refreshing change for everyone. The ideas come back in writing, on a level playing field, where the best one wins instead of the fastest one.

A quick sort for your calendar

Look at next week. Every meeting falls into one of four buckets.

• Status updates. Should be a written summary. AI can draft it from the project tracker. Kill the meeting. Nobody will attend the funeral.
• Brainstorm from zero. Should start with a prompt. Often the prompt answers it, and the invite never goes out. If not, hold a short kickoff and send everyone off to think.
• Decisions. Keep. Send the options in advance so the meeting starts at the decision, not the explanation.
• Hard conversations. Keep. Protect them. No prompt replaces a person who looks you in the eye and says, "I hear you."

Most calendars are heavy on the first two and light on the last two. That is backwards. It is also why your best thinking happens in the car on the way home.

The part people miss

This is not an anti-meeting essay. Some meetings look inefficient and are not. The ten minutes of small talk before the agenda is how teams learn who is stressed, who is stuck, and who just had a baby. Cut that and you save time and lose a team.

So do not kill the human part. Kill the whiteboard dictation. The dry-erase markers will survive. They always do, somehow, at 40% ink.

Let the machine do the first draft. Let the people do the thinking, the arguing, and the deciding.

Then end the meeting early. Nobody has ever complained about that.