A growing collection of pocket-sized gadgets lets you record your meetings and extract value from them. Whether sitting in class, a meeting, or an interview, I've never been fond of taking notes, and I'm far from alone. Not only does the process of scribbling something down cause me to miss what was said immediately after, but I also suffer from awful handwriting, meaning that I can rarely read the notes anyway. Recording interviews has long been a solution, but transcribing interviews is another step (with extra cost) that can leave you with thousands of words of material to sift through, much of it irrelevant. AI notetakers--massively popular at CES 2026 --have emerged to offer a new way of making IRL notetaking easier and faster, putting the power of AI into (or at least adjacent to) a portable device that evokes the microcassette recorder of yesteryear.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has received significant attention in recent years, primarily due to breakthroughs in game playing, computer vision, and natural language processing that captured the imagination of the scientific community and the public at large. Many businesses, industries, and academic disciplines are now contemplating the application of AI to their own challenges. The federal government in the US and other countries have also invested significantly in advancing AI research and created funding initiatives and programs to promote greater collaboration across multiple communities. Some of the investment examples in the US include the establishment of the National AI Initiative Office, the launch of the National AI Research Resource Task Force, and more recently, the establishment of the National AI Advisory Committee. In 2021 INFORMS and ACM SIGAI joined together with the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to organize a series of three workshops. The objective for this workshop series is to explore ways to exploit the synergies of the AI and Operations Research (OR) communities to transform decision making.