Calendar is an online meeting scheduling and calendar app that uses AI to save you time.
With machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), Calendar analyzes your meeting content, attendees, and habits, then provides recommendations on everything from optimal meeting times to which meetings matter most.
The result is that marketers and businesspeople collaborate better and save time thanks to machine-assisted meetings. We spoke with Calendar co-founder John Hall to learn more.
Calendar is a smart time management tool. By saving you time on scheduling, it helps you make better decisions and spend your time on the things that matter most.
Calendar uses artificial intelligence to provide a personalized scheduling experience. By combining machine learning with natural language processing, Calendar “reads” your relationships and meeting habits. That allows it to categorize meetings, suggest documents, optimize meeting times for all attendees, provide transcriptions, and more. As it learns your key relationships and favorite meeting spots, its recommendations improve over time.
Calendar can make marketers’ lives easier in a few ways. Three use cases stand out:
1. Resource management and reporting.
Businesses waste an estimated $37 billion on meetings each year. Calendar can minimize the amount of time marketers not only spend scheduling meetings, but also the time they spend meeting with non-essential stakeholders. Its reporting dashboard provides an easy-to-read breakdown of with whom each individual, as well as the aggregated team, is meeting.
2. Communication.
Especially in our age of remote work, miscommunications happen. Calendar’s natural language processing system spits out a transcript after each meeting is finished, ensuring there’s never a question about what was said. And if a related document could clarify an idea, Calendar can predict that and dig it up.
3. Collaboration.
Through a few smart features, Calendar makes it easier for marketers to collaborate. Time zone recognition automatically adjusts meeting times when it sees participants calling in from different zones. Multi-person scheduling helps get larger teams together, while location suggestions can identify that quiet coffee shop close to everyone.
Most digital calendars can schedule meetings, and some offer basic analytics. But after interviewing over 500 people, we learned there’s no all-in-one tool to streamline scheduling or suggest better ways to spend your time.
Where Calendar shines is its ability to learn your schedule and provide personalized recommendations. Suggestions for when and where meetings should take place minimize back-and-forth emails and prevent double-bookings. Calendar’s built-in transcription tool means nobody has to jot notes while they’re trying to pay attention to the team’s discussion. Seeing not just who you’re meeting, but also in what kinds of meetings you’re spending your time, helps you align your time with your team’s goals.
No. Businesses and teams of any size can benefit from using Calendar.
Any company.
Artificial intelligence has come a really long way in a short period of time. When applied to big data, pattern recognition, and the automation of repetitive tasks, AI shines. However, limitations still exist in the areas where humans are unique: emotions, subjective thinking, creativity.
As AI continues to advance, so will the ability to use it to improve marketing strategies and provide valuable customer insights for companies. It will shift us away from automation to personalization and eventually prediction. AI will never eliminate humans from all decision-making, but it will provide the information we need to make better decisions.
Take a crawl-walk-run approach. First explore tools in personal, low-stakes situations. Try scheduling a few internal meetings in Calendar, for example, and see how suggestions improve as the platform learns your preferences.
Then, apply it to department-specific challenges. If communication is an issue across your marketing department and you don’t see any stand-ups in their analytics, ask how often they’re actually getting together as a team.
Once you’re confident in the tool, take it for a “run.” Executives’ time is expensive, for example: Maybe you want them to be spending 50% or more of their time meeting with people at the director level or above. Once you trust it, Calendar can provide unbiased, hands-off reporting on key time-management initiatives.