Otter, Fathom, Fireflies, Granola, and the native AI in Zoom, Meet, and Teams. A note-taker joins (or listens locally), records, transcribes, identifies speakers, and produces a summary with extracted action items. The better ones let you search across past meetings and ask questions of the archive.
What it is for: never losing what was said. It is a memory prosthetic, and a good one.
What it cannot do: anything during the meeting. It has no voice, no knowledge of your priorities, and no mandate. If the room needs something from you, the note-taker faithfully records the room not getting it. Action items are extracted as text for you to do later, not done.
When it is the right choice: you were in the meeting yourself, or you only need to know what happened. This category is also rapidly becoming free, because the platforms bundle it.
The newer category: AI agents sold as staff. They hold job titles, take on tasks, and meetings are one of the places they do their job. When an AI worker joins a call, it is there as itself, an artificial colleague, not as you. Some vendors sell tiers of meeting authority, from silent observation up to speaking and acting.
What it is for: offloading a function. If you want a unit of work done and do not care that a human never touches it, an AI worker is the shape of that.
The catch: an AI worker represents itself, or at most its function. It does not know what you would say, is not briefed on your relationships, and its mistakes are made in its own name but on your payroll. The trust question is "is this thing competent at the job," which is a much bigger bet than "can this thing relay my update accurately."
When it is the right choice: high-volume, low-context work where a meeting is just a venue, and where nobody in the room expected a specific person.
A delegate exists because meetings are not generic venues. The Tuesday client call does not need "an AI." It needs you: your update, your answers about your accounts, your commitments. A delegate is an AI that attends as your representative when you cannot, with three obligations a note-taker and a worker do not have.
It must speak for you accurately. A delegate delivers the update you briefed it on, in your words, and answers questions from your briefing and your connected tools. Ask Harlyn where a renewal stands and it answers out loud from your CRM in about a second. That is the difference between "the meeting got a recording of your absence" and "the meeting got what it needed from you."
It must know what it may not say. This is the hard part of the category and the reason a delegate cannot just be a chatbot with a microphone. It speaks as an absent person, so an invented answer or an unauthorized commitment is not a bug, it is your delegate putting words in your mouth in front of a client. A serious delegate is conservative by design: briefing plus your own tools defines what it may assert, and everything else gets deferred. Harlyn goes one step further and makes the deferral useful: it pings you live in Slack, and if you answer while the meeting is still running, it speaks your reply into the room. Question to spoken answer runs about nine seconds when you reply promptly.
It must act only with permission. A delegate that hears "update the close date to March" and silently writes to your CRM is a liability. Harlyn stages every write, reads it back, and executes only on an explicit yes, from the room or from you afterward. The approval is the product, not a speed bump.
A delegate should also include the note-taker layer, because you should not need two bots in one meeting. Harlyn produces the summary, searchable transcript, action items, and recording alongside the delegation work.
Ask one question of any product in this space: when the room asks a question that only the absent person can answer, what happens?
Everything else about the category follows from that answer.
And on disclosure: whichever category you choose, the AI should be unmistakably an AI. Harlyn identifies itself on the roster ("Harlyn (AI delegate for Nick)"), in the meeting chat, and in its first spoken words. If a vendor's product can be mistaken for a human participant, that is not a feature.
Harlyn is an AI delegate, in private beta, free while we learn from early users. If your calendar has a standing conflict in it right now, that meeting is the honest way to evaluate the category.