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How can artificial intelligence connect knowledge and decisions across recurring remote meetings to prevent information loss?

Too Much, Too Scattered: Supporting Organizational Memory Across Meetings
Chiara Krisam, Haoran Yang · International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) · 2026
Illustration for: How can artificial intelligence connect knowledge and decisions across recurring remote meetings to prevent information loss?

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Key findings

  • Knowledge workers experience severe information overload and struggle with knowledge fragmentation because critical discussions are scattered across separate meetings, notes, and task-tracking platforms.
  • Six design requirements were established: context enrichment, cross-meeting functionality, centralized knowledge access, personalized summaries, user control with privacy safeguards, and output reliability.
  • Three core design principles were formulated to support organizational memory: context-aware knowledge capture, a unified cross-meeting knowledge base, and controlled, personalized knowledge access.
  • A functional web prototype was developed that synthesizes multi-meeting transcripts into cumulative project memory and enables natural-language conversational queries across meeting histories.
  • The study notes limitations including a small interview sample within a single IT organization, reliance on manual transcript uploads, and the need for future longitudinal evaluation of privacy controls and adoption barriers.

What it means for you

CIO / IT Executive

Initiate an architecture review to evaluate integrating our meeting transcription tools into a unified, cross-meeting knowledge base rather than keeping them isolated by session.

IT Manager

Audit your team's current meeting notes and task-tracking platforms to consolidate scattered project decisions into a single shared document.

Business Strategist

Draft a standard template for recurring project meetings that explicitly links current agenda items to past decisions and ongoing rationales.

Researcher

Design a longitudinal evaluation study to measure the impact of automated cross-meeting synthesis on reducing employee cognitive overload.

Policymaker

Draft enterprise guidelines addressing user control, personalized knowledge access, and privacy safeguards for AI meeting transcription tools.

Summary

This design science research study investigates how agentic remote meeting systems can preserve and connect organizational knowledge across recurring meetings. Grounded in organizational memory theory, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with ten IT knowledge workers at a large enterprise to identify core collaboration challenges. Using these empirical insights, they derived design requirements and developed a web-based prototype that links meeting transcripts into an evolving project-level knowledge base.

Problem

While remote meetings produce critical decisions and rationales, this knowledge frequently becomes fragmented across individual meeting summaries, personal notes, and disjointed tools. Current artificial intelligence meeting assistants typically focus on isolated sessions, treating meetings as discrete events rather than interconnected sequences. Consequently, knowledge workers face substantial cognitive overload and retrieval effort when attempting to reconstruct project continuity and past agreements over time.

Transcript
Host: Welcome to A.I.S. Insights — powered by Living Knowledge. I'm Anna Ivy Summers. Today, we are discussing a study titled "Too Much, Too Scattered: Supporting Organizational Memory Across Meetings" by Chiara Krisam and Haoran Yang, published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems in 2026. Alex, welcome.

Expert: Thank you, Anna. In short, this study investigates how agentic remote meeting systems can preserve and connect organizational knowledge across recurring meetings, rather than treating each conversation in isolation.

Host: Remote meetings are central to modern business, but where does the problem lie when managing that knowledge?

Expert: The problem is fragmentation. When teams meet remotely, they generate critical decisions, contextual trade-offs, and action items. However, that information quickly scatters across individual summaries, personal notes, and isolated task-tracking platforms. Most artificial intelligence meeting tools focus solely on single sessions. Because they treat meetings as discrete events, workers experience significant cognitive overload and spend substantial time trying to reconstruct project history and past agreements.

Host: How did the researchers approach this problem?

Expert: They applied a design science research approach informed by organizational memory theory. To gather empirical data, they conducted semi-structured interviews with ten IT knowledge workers at a large enterprise. Based on the challenges identified in those interviews, they derived specific design requirements, formulated design principles, and built a web-based prototype to test how multi-meeting transcripts can be connected into an evolving knowledge base.

Host: What were the primary findings from those interviews and the development process?

Expert: The interviews confirmed that professionals struggle with fragmented information spread across disconnected tools. From this, the authors defined six design requirements: context enrichment, cross-meeting functionality, centralized knowledge access, personalized summaries, user control with privacy safeguards, and output reliability.

Host: And how were those requirements translated into actionable design?

Expert: They established three core design principles: context-aware knowledge capture, a unified cross-meeting knowledge base, and controlled, personalized access. Using these principles, they developed a functional prototype that aggregates transcripts across meetings into a cumulative project memory. Users can ask conversational, natural-language questions across the entire project history instead of searching through separate meeting files.

Host: Did the authors highlight any limitations in the study?

Expert: Yes. The initial interviews involved a small sample of ten participants within a single IT organization. Additionally, the prototype currently relies on manual transcript uploads, and the authors noted that longitudinal evaluations in operational settings are necessary to assess privacy concerns and user adoption barriers over time.

Host: Let's turn to the practical side. Why does this matter for business leaders and technology teams?

Expert: For organizations, the takeaway is to move away from isolated meeting notes toward interconnected knowledge repositories. When meeting data is linked across a project lifecycle, teams can onboard new members faster, track the evolution of past decisions, and reduce duplicated effort. Practitioners building or purchasing collaboration tools should prioritize solutions that support cross-meeting queries and structured project memory, while ensuring strict data privacy and role-based access controls are built in from the start.

Host: In summary, treating meetings as an interconnected sequence rather than standalone events can help organizations retain critical context and improve operational continuity. Alex, thank you for sharing these insights.

Expert: My pleasure, Anna.

Host: Thank you for listening to A.I.S. Insights — powered by Living Knowledge. Join us again next time.
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Remote Meetings, Organizational Memory, Meeting Summarization, Agentic Systems, Design Science Research, Knowledge Management