AUSTIN, TX — Derek Paulson, 41, a mid-level project manager at a software logistics firm, confirmed Tuesday that after eight months of substituting AI-generated meeting summaries for actual meeting attendance, his first in-person appearance at a quarterly review left him unable to identify three colleagues by name, recognize the product his team is building, or explain what his job currently requires of him.

Paulson, who described the AI summarizer as “genuinely life-changing,” said he had accumulated what he called a “clean, frictionless understanding” of company operations entirely through bullet points, none of which prepared him for the moment a senior director asked him directly to weigh in on the Hartwell migration timeline. Paulson said he smiled and nodded for eleven seconds before excusing himself to find the restroom, where he remained for four minutes asking his phone what the Hartwell migration was.

“The summaries were perfect. Concise, professional, totally confident. That was the problem — I started to sound like them.”

“I knew the what,” Paulson told reporters. “I just didn’t know the why, the who, the context, the history, or apparently the name of the product we launched in November.”

His manager, Renee Ochoa, 38, said she had noticed Paulson’s responses in written recaps had grown “unusually articulate” over the past several months but assumed it reflected professional growth. “In retrospect,” she said, “it reflected a different kind of growth.”

At press time, Paulson had asked his AI assistant to summarize the meeting in which he failed to understand the meeting, and felt much better about how it went.