Introduction
Meetings are getting shorter, but not fewer. Average duration dropped from 51 to 47 minutes, while volume held steady.
Friday is fading. Just 16% of meetings now happen on Friday, and that share keeps shrinking.
External collaboration is up. 46% of meetings now include someone outside your company.
1-on-1s are growing. Direct conversations now make up nearly a quarter of all meetings.
AI is shifting meetings from discussion to execution. Early data shows 69% of AI-assisted meetings now generate actionable artifacts, with a median time-to-first-draft of zero minutes.
The scale of modern meetings (2023-2025)
Value: 50.9 million hours
Total meeting hours captured since 2023
Over the past three years, Supernormal's products have captured more than 50 million hours of meetings. Based on average attendee time valued at $48/hour, those meetings represent $17.3B in economic value. How we meet and what we get out of meetings is a major consideration for businesses, and even entire economies.
Value: $1 trillion per year
Estimated U.S. economic cost of meetings
American knowledge workers spend an estimated $1 trillion worth of time in meetings each year. See the Methodology section for how we calculated this. That's not inherently a problem—but it raises the question of how much of that time workers should spend in meetings to deliver value.
When the world meets
Meetings by day of week
Tuesday remains the most popular meeting day (21% of weekly meetings), followed closely by Monday and Wednesday. Meeting load drops noticeably by Thursday and falls off sharply on Friday.
Decline of Friday meetings
Friday meetings now account for just 16% of the weekly total. After peaking in 2024, Friday's share has started to slip as teams protect the end of the week for focused work. Whether it's due to hybrid policies, focus time initiatives, or simple preference, Friday is increasingly becoming a meeting-light day.
Meetings outside standard business hours
Nearly 30% of meetings occur in the evening (after 6pm UTC), while 12% start before 9am. For globally distributed teams, "business hours" is an increasingly flexible concept.
Most common meeting hour globally
2pm UTC (9am EST / 6am PST) is the single most popular meeting start time, capturing over 9% of all meetings. The concentration of meetings between 2pm and 5pm UTC reflects the overlap window between European afternoon and North American morning.
What meeting names reveal about work
These names represent the core rhythms of how teams work: alignment, updates, and collaborative thinking.
Sync/Check-in meetings are the most common type in our dataset, followed by Standups. These two categories alone account for more meetings than all other named types combined
Meeting names signal meeting size
All Hands and Standups consistently draw the largest crowds, often 10+ attendees. These are coordination meetings where alignment happens across teams or the entire company. On the other end, 1-on-1s and Interviews stay lean by design, typically 2–4 people focused on a single relationship or decision.
The pattern is intuitive: the broader the topic, the bigger the room. Standups are the most likely meeting type to exceed 10 attendees (45% of all standups), while 1-on-1s almost never do.
The shift toward intentional meetings
People aren't meeting less, they're meeting smarter
For years, calendars trended in one direction: fuller. In 2024, that started to change. But this isn't a rejection of meetings, it's a sign that teams are getting more deliberate about when a meeting is the right tool.
2024: The peak
Behavior
% of Users
Increased (>5% more meetings)
76%
Decreased (>5% fewer meetings)
21%
Maintained (±5%)
3%
2025: The correction
Behavior
% of Users
Increased (>5% more meetings)
60%
Decreased (>5% fewer meetings)
34%
Maintained (±5%)
5%
AI-assisted meetings
Growth of AI-assisted meetings
AI-powered meeting tools went from novelty to necessity between 2023 and 2025. What started as transcription has evolved into summarization, action-item extraction, and now automated follow-through.
AI in meetings
AI notetakers are now present in a significant share of professional meetings. For many teams, the question has shifted from "should we use AI?" to "how do we use it well?"
Next-step trends
The next wave of AI meeting tools isn't just about capturing what happened, but acting on it. Drafting follow-up emails, scheduling next steps, and pushing action items to project management tools are all emerging behaviors.
AI-driven meeting changes
When AI handles documentation, the meeting itself can change. Early signals suggest that AI-assisted meetings may trend shorter and more action-oriented, since less time is spent on manual note-taking and recap.
Early signals (July-Nov 2025)
In mid-2025 we launched our mac app, and early usage patterns began to show how meetings might evolve beyond documentation and toward execution. When we talk about 'artifacts' here, we mean any work output that AI generates from a meeting.
What this means for meetings in 2026
1
Meeting volume stabilizes
After years of steady growth, meeting volume is plateauing. Teams have hit a ceiling, and are now optimizing rather than adding.
2
Meetings continue to get shorter and more outcome-focused
The 60-minute default is fading. Expect more 25- and 45-minute meetings designed around specific decisions or outputs.
3
External collaboration keeps rising
Nearly half of all meetings already involve external participants. That share will only grow as partnerships, vendor relationships, and distributed work become the norm.
4
Fewer follow-up syncs
When AI can summarize, draft, and distribute next steps instantly, the "let's schedule a follow-up to align" meeting becomes less necessary.
5
AI execution becomes expected, not novel
By the end of 2026, AI-generated meeting artifacts will feel as normal as calendar invites. The question will shift from "Do you use AI?" to "What do you do with it?"
Methodology
Report resources
How to cite this report
Supernormal. "State of Meetings 2026: What We've Learned from 50 Million Hours of Meetings." Supernormal, January 2026. https://www.supernormal.com/state-of-meetings