rewrite this title Otter.ai CEO Sam Liang on Conversational AI, Privacy, and Why Lawsuits “Are Part of Doing Business” – UC Today

Otter.ai created the AI meeting assistant category eight years ago. Since then, it has processed billions of meetings.

But CEO Sam Liang argues the industry has stayed stuck at the same first step.

“Transcription, summary, a little bit of chat, but they’re not really connecting the knowledge,” he told UC Today.

The Conversational Knowledge Engine aims to change that.

It aggregates meeting data across an entire organisation, building what Liang calls a longitudinal knowledge graph.

That graph maps entities including clients, projects, topics and people, tracking who said what, who the subject-matter experts are, and how knowledge evolves over time. And the scale of the problem is bigger than most realise.

Liang points out that enterprise employees – everyone outside of engineering – now spend more than 50% of their time in meetings. That is an enormous amount of knowledge generation with nowhere to go.

Filling a Gap in the Enterprise Stack

Liang frames the launch around a clear gap. Enterprises have CRM for sales data, HRS for HR data and ERP for financial data. But no system of record has ever existed for conversational data.

“Most people haven’t realised how much business intelligence has been generated in meetings,” he said. “And how much has been lost over the past 100 years.”

The engine uses a permission model modelled on Slack channels, allowing organisations to control which meeting notes are private, team-specific or company-wide. Data retention controls let enterprises configure how long transcripts, recordings and summaries are stored before automatic deletion.

Taking on Microsoft, Zoom and Google

Liang did not hold back on competitors. Microsoft, Zoom and Google, he argued, remain first-generation tools – useful individually but siloed by design.

Otter is also facing ongoing legal scrutiny over recording consent. Liang addressed it directly: “We’re on the right side of history.” He predicted the debate will fade within three to five years. “People will be mentally dependent on AI at that time,” he said.

The AI meeting assistant market is projected to grow from $1.2 billion in 2025 to $6.28 billion by 2035. Liang’s vision for where that growth leads is striking. Voice, he argues, is about to replace the written prompt entirely.

“AI already knows who you are, what your preference is, what your point of view is – by listening to you,” he said. “Your voice is the prompt. You just keep talking.”