Futures Wheels: Exploring Implications of Emerging Futures

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to attend all of those “meetings that should have been an email”?It sounds too good to be true, and many companies selling enterprise users on AI love to use the “AI proxy,” “AI avatar,” or “AI assistant” as a silver bullet use case for adopting AI. Shed the drudgery, do what you love.

This sounds awesome, but what if everyone starts sending their AI surrogates to attend virtual meetings in their stead? What if we just end up with rooms full of AI communicating to each other? What if this is the beginning of the end of meetings as we know it? 

Diving deep into these “what if” questions is part of what futurists do. And fortunately, our experience with these questions has taught us that our “what ifs” typically generate more “what ifs,” and these can help us build more robust visions of the futures that could unfold around us. We don’t have take claims about the future at face value.

And this is where a foundational strategic foresight method, the Futures Wheel, can really shine in helping people and teams think about the implications of anything, but especially for areas that create feelings of uncertainty like artificial intelligence.

The futures wheel is a mind map about the implications of a trend, event, product, service, or policy. The futures wheel is important because it helps us organize our thinking and questioning about the future, and organizing thoughts about the future(s) is what good futurists do.

Before we dive directly into the Futures Wheel method, it’s important to remember when it is most useful and influential:

• Group settings and workshops
• Think through impacts
• Organize thoughts
• Unearth interrelationships
• Generating new ideas linked to the original insight

To create a futures wheel, we center the wheel on the topic we want to focus on; so let’s use “People sending AI to attend meetings for them,” as the center of this futures wheel example.I built a rough futures wheel about this topic earlier, using software called Scapple, but you can use a pen and paper or your favorite whiteboard app or slides to build it. 

First-Order Implications

For first-order implications, we can consider our immediate reactions to the potential influence of AI proxies in meetings:

1. More Meetings Are Recorded: With AI surrogates attending in place of humans, it becomes essential to have recordings for review later and to enable async participation. As a result, the demand for meeting recordings is likely to surge, making recordings a default expectation rather than an exception. This could lead to more sophisticated recording and archiving tools, as well as increased scrutiny over what is said in meetings.
2. Fewer People Attend Meetings: The very purpose of these AI proxies is to reduce the burden of attending meetings, especially for people who feel like their attendance isn’t necessary. Human participants will be selective about which meetings require their direct involvement, allowing AI to handle routine discussions. But does this really lead to a bunch of AI having the meeting with no humans present?
3. AI as Personal Admin Becomes a Popular Use Case: One of the first compelling use cases for AI in meetings is its role as a personal administrative assistant to help with taking notes and transcribing audio. I’ve already seen many non-technical teams excited by the potential for AI to handle meeting transcriptions, summarizations, and action points. 
4. People Expect AI to Do More in Meetings Than Just Listen: As AI continues to evolve, it won’t be enough for it to simply observe and record meetings. There will be growing expectations for AI to contribute actively—whether that means answering questions, suggesting ideas, or providing clarifications in real-time. This shift towards more agentic AI means that meetings could become more efficient, but it also raises questions about the boundaries of AI capabilities and the accuracy of its inputs.
5. Virtual Avatars Become “Deepfakes” of Real Humans: Companies like Zoom, Apple, and Meta are heavily investing in photorealistic avatars to make virtual meetings feel more immersive. As these avatars improve, they may begin to blur the line between actual human presence and AI representation. This raises questions about authenticity, and whether people will trust the interactions they have with these avatars as much as they do with real human faces. The implications here could extend into both workplace culture and interpersonal trust.

To explore the second-order implications more deeply, let’s consider how the future might shift as fewer people attend meetings in person. What happens when human presence becomes the exception rather than the norm?

Second-Order Implications

1. Agendas Become Even More Important: As AIs fill meeting slots in place of humans, the need for precision in agendas will rise. An AI surrogate might need structured data to determine what it contributes or what actions it recommends to its human counterpart. And if we’re optimizing meetings for the machines, do we really need meetings or better ways for workplace AI agents to interact?
2. In-Person Meetings Obtain a High Premium: As fewer people attend meetings directly, those that do will have a lot more responsibility. Human presence will imply value—a demonstration that the meeting topic is critical enough to warrant direct input. The stakes for in-person attendance will increase, making these meetings moments that cannot be outsourced. In-person participation could become a badge of authority, expertise, or urgency–or we fall back into the trap of every meeting being positioned as necessary.
3. Human Attendees Resent Being the Only “Person” in the Room: When a meeting is filled predominantly with AI avatars or proxies, the human who shows up live could feel isolated or burdened with additional labor. This could lead to resentment, not just at the meeting itself but potentially toward those who chose to send an AI in their place. This tension could foster a new kind of office politics and a deep reassessment of roles and responsibilities.
4. “This Could Have Been an Email” Culture Takes Root: If AIs are tasked with attending meetings, they may also analyze which meetings are actually worth having. A more sophisticated AI might determine that a discussion doesn’t warrant real-time interaction and suggest alternatives—such as a concise email or an asynchronous discussion thread. This cultural shift could challenge the traditional structure of corporate communication, pushing companies to rethink what types of conversations truly require a live audience.

Third-Order Impacts

Now, let’s take these second-order effects and explore their potential third-order impacts.

1. Increased Reliance on Structured Information: As agendas and structured communication become more essential, companies might invest heavily in tools that allow more effective documentation and categorization of information. We could see the rise of more AI-assisted pre-meeting tools that rely on structured information to make determinations on whether a meeting is necessary and who should be included, or what updates each team member should contribute. In the long run, pre-meeting capture of information could become so seamless that a meeting just turns into an email, video, or audio debrief composed of structured updates.
2. Reinforcing Existing Hierarchies: The premium on in-person meetings may lead to a hierarchy where only certain people are expected (or trusted) to show up in person, while others send their AI surrogates. This could reinforce existing power dynamics in organizations, with leadership or specialized roles gaining even more exclusivity. Meeting attendance becomes not just about participation, but also about influence and access to power.
3. Erosion of Workplace Relationships: Human relationships are often built through shared experiences—even mundane ones, like attending the same tedious meeting. If AI proxies begin to dominate attendance, fewer opportunities will exist for these casual, serendipitous interactions that foster relationships and trust among colleagues. This could lead to workplaces where collaboration feels more transactional, with fewer personal bonds tying people together. Ultimately, the lack of human connection might reduce the sense of loyalty or camaraderie within teams.
4. New Ethical Concerns and AI Regulations: If AIs begin deciding which meetings are necessary, we might face questions around who controls those decisions. Would an AI determine that certain viewpoints aren’t worth bringing up live? Could bias creep into what gets deemed important? This could spark a wave of new ethical guidelines and regulations around AI decision-making in workplace environments, to ensure that human needs and diverse perspectives are not marginalized.

The cascading implications of something seemingly simple—sending an AI to attend meetings—highlight how technology adoption isn’t just about convenience. It’s about understanding the systemic shifts that occur and how they could shape the culture, values, and operations of organizations in the long run.

What Do You Think?

How do you feel about the idea of AI attending meetings on behalf of people? Would the erosion of in-person participation impact workplace culture for better or worse? And, importantly, what role do you see yourself playing in such a future?

And now that you’ve seen a few steps of applying the futures wheel, your mind may be wanting to explore the implications of a completely different spoke of the wheel, or you may want to go deeper into fifth and sixth order implications. Embrace it! And embrace the importance of tools and methods that make it easy to organize your thoughts about the future.