The label gets applied to a recorder, to a text relay, and to a genuine stand-in, and they deliver three very different results. If you are double-booked next Tuesday, or traveling, or out sick, it is worth knowing which kind of AI meeting assistant you are actually getting before you rely on it.
1. A recorder attends. This is the note-taker category: Otter, Fathom, Fireflies, and the AI companions built into Zoom, Meet, and Teams. A bot joins, records, transcribes, and sends you a summary afterward. This is genuinely useful, and it has become table stakes. But nothing represented you. If someone asked "is Nick's team on track for the pilot?", the room got silence, and you got a transcript of the silence the next morning.
2. A text stand-in attends. Google Meet has shipped an "attend for me" feature that can post your talking points into the meeting as text and collect notes for you. This is closer to representation, but it is one-directional and silent. It cannot answer a question, cannot handle a follow-up, and cannot tell the room anything it was not loaded with in advance.
3. A delegate attends. A delegate joins the call as a participant, speaks when spoken to, and acts on your behalf within limits you set. It delivers your update out loud, in your words. When someone asks it a question, it answers from the briefing you gave it and from your connected tools, live. When someone asks something only you can answer, it says so, pings you, and if you reply while the meeting is still running, it speaks your answer back into the room. Afterward you get the full record: what was asked, what it said, what it declined to answer, and what the room asked it to pass along to you.
Harlyn is in the third category. That is the product this page is about, so the rest of this answer describes how delegation actually works, including the parts an honest vendor should tell you up front.
These are shipped behaviors, not roadmap:
This part matters more than the feature list. A delegate speaks as an absent person, which means the failure mode is not a bad summary, it is your AI committing you to something in front of your client.
A well-built delegate is deliberately conservative. It represents only what you briefed it on plus facts from your own connected tools. Asked for an opinion, a judgment call, or a commitment you did not authorize, it declines and takes the question back to you. Harlyn is built on a defer-by-default rule: when in doubt, it says "that one is for Nick, let me get it to him" rather than improvising. In practice, a delegate that knows what it does not know is what makes the whole idea usable with real clients.
Legally and practically, an AI participant is in the same territory as a recording note-taker, which most meetings already have. The etiquette bar is disclosure, and it should be higher than a name tag.
Harlyn is designed for transparency and is never covert. It shows up on the roster as exactly what it is, for example "Harlyn (AI delegate for Nick)." It posts a one-time notice in the meeting chat explaining what it will and will not do. And the first words it speaks introduce it as an AI. Attendees are never left wondering whether the extra participant is a person.
One norm worth adopting: send a delegate for real conflicts. Double-bookings, client obligations, travel, sick days, parental leave. A delegate exists so a legitimate absence does not cost you your seat at the table. It is coverage, not an excuse to skip work you should attend.
If all you need is a record of a meeting, a note-taker is enough, and Harlyn includes that layer so you are not adding another bot to the room. The delegate is for the meetings where your absence has a cost: the weekly client call that stalls without your update, the pipeline review where questions about your deals go unanswered, the fractional executive running three clients whose calendars collide weekly.
The test is simple. After the meeting you missed, did the room get what it needed from you, and did you get what you needed from the room? A recording answers neither. A delegate is built to answer both.
Harlyn is in private beta. It is free, and feedback is the price. If you want to see a delegate handle a live meeting before trusting it with one of yours, the demo shows real shipped behavior, not a concept reel.