Fireflies.ai was initially a bot that documented the conversations during meetings. According to CEO Krish Ramineni, the next edition of this bot will respond to Slack, manage your inbox and conduct interviews of the prospective employees. The notetaker appears on the participants’ list, stays silent and leaves behind a written account of the discussion. Fireflies is such an integral part of my routine that I do not even notice its presence. And now that is about to change.
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Fireflies.ai shifts its narrative from AI notetaker to AI teammate. It begins with sprawl. “People don’t want 50 different tools or 50 different dashboards,” Ramineni explains. “They want something that is easy to access anywhere.”
And this teammate will work within email, Slack, the CRM, Notion, and Google Drive, bringing context from meetings. The millions who already use Fireflies, he said, serve as a starting point. Take an example where someone asks a question on Slack, which had already been answered via email or on the call. He flags down the AI and asks it to find the answer. A daily briefing looks into all channels and highlights what blocks the team. “That’s something I would have my EA do every day for me,” he said.
I queried whether this makes Fireflies move beyond observation to actions. “Yes, it’s an action taker,” he answered. In a dig at rival “personal secretary” narratives, he said they “haven’t actually proven out any use case.”
A lot of it is live – meeting preparation, task management, and an email assistant that sorts your emails and even drafts them for you. Ramineni states, “The assistant has been used very heavily since we announced it.” According to him, “There are a number of products that we’ll be releasing, whereas the assistant itself, which is called Fred, has hundreds of skills that you can program into, like creating presentations or drafts in your voice.” The notetaker is just scratching the surface,” he adds.
And the largest step would be voice agents that run meetings from beginning to end. “It is acting on my behalf,” according to Ramineni. Fireflies claims their agents have conducted over 40,000 conversations in 2,100+ companies in 97 countries.
Inside Fireflies, every employee recruited in the last year passed a voice agent screening interview process. “By the time I wake up in the morning, the AI has already interviewed 50 people and stack-ranked them,” he says.
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Voice agents are suitable for repeat one-to-one interviews, surveys, screenings, and receptionist-like inquiries. Voice agents are not effective when used in all-hands situations or overlapping conversations. When stuck, it says, “We will get back to you on that.”
According to Ramineni, there is no difference in data handling at any point once the bot starts speaking, “you’re doing the same thing as when you are recording and transcribing meetings.” Fireflies claims that it does not use customer data for training and is SOC 2 compliant. Candidate fills a form prior to signing up, and watches the Fireflies orb blinking while it talks. “We’re not pretending that the AI is human, like some other tools,” he states. Agents accept inbound, opt-in calls only. “Robocalling is not allowed, so we’re not doing that.”
Regarding accountability, he states: “it’s how you’re setting up the agent.” Hence, the responsibility lies on the business implementing it. According to him, the algorithm is less biased than recruiters “because they can’t remain objective,” although he did not mention any external audits of the scores provided, and the authorities of several markets are scrutinizing recruiting algorithms. The teammate should also have access to email, Slack and CRM data. This was not discussed during our talk.
“Transactional decisions we would always put in the fold of a human,” says Ramineni, citing those who use an agent with a credit card that “wastes money.” Trust will take time, he argues, as it has done for almost all new technologies to emerge, as it had done for 1990s e-commerce.
The queue is already forming. Autofill CRM was designed in such a way that each entry is reviewed by a human before it can be added. And there are some existing customers who are asking now, “Can you auto-upload it?” That, according to him, was “a surprise.” Fireflies is dealing with this problem by offering options to each individual where he or she can control the degree of autonomy of the agent. “There are going to be levels of trust,” he put very eloquently, “We have to earn that trust over time.”
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