After-hours meetings are on the rise. AI could make things even worse
After-hours meetings have gone from rare to regular occurrences, and while some are hoping AI can help reverse the trend, experts warn breaking the habit will take more than tech.
In a recent survey conducted by AI-powered workspace provider Miro, 33% of US-based knowledge workers said they frequently attended after-hours meetings in 2025, up from 23% in 2024.
“Six in 10 people attend meetings after hours at least once a month, and that has all kinds of negative downstream effects,” says Dom Katz, Miro’s ways of working lead. “The data suggests more and more people consistently have meetings after their usual workday ends, and it’s getting worse; not just in the U.S. or Europe, but across the board.”
Katz explains that the explosion in after-hours meetings is likely an extension of the rise in meetings more broadly. According to a 2025 study by Miro, for each hour a worker spends on “momentum work”—like brainstorming, collaborative workshops and interactive cross functional projects—they spend three more on maintenance tasks, like emails, paperwork and meetings. “It creates stress, it’s a productivity drain, and saps them off their creativity,” Katz says.
Katz explains that scheduling and video conferencing technology has made it easier than ever to call a meeting. But he also warns that without proper guidelines, workers are likely to get stuck in a lot of unnecessary meetings, during and beyond standard operating hours.
“Bad meeting hygiene is definitely a contributor,” he says. “You get into the meeting, there’s no agenda, they run over constantly, there’s no decisions made, so you get another meeting around it; it’s incredibly ineffective.”
Why We’re Meeting More at Night
The Miro data is consistent with Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, which found that meetings after 8 p.m. increased 16% from the previous year. According to that study, which was based on anonymized Microsoft Teams user data, the bulk of the increase was attributed to global and flexible teams.
“In our sentiment data, which goes out to 31,000 people, 80% of employees said they didn’t feel like they had enough time and energy to do their job, so we know people are feeling burnt out,” says Alexia Cambon, director, office of applied research at Microsoft. “The lack of firm boundaries between personal life and professional life is probably a contributor.”
Cambon hypothesizes that meetings began creeping into non-working hours during the pandemic and the transition to remote work. That period, she explains, introduced many to digital meetings tools—which made it possible to call a meeting with a few clicks—while making it harder to switch off at the end of the day.
The added flexibility may have also allowed some to shift their work schedules in ways that better suited their personal needs, like putting off meetings until after their kids were in bed.
Another potential factor, suggests Cambon, is the increasingly global nature of work. According to the Microsoft study, nearly a third of meetings span multiple time zones, a 35% increase from 2021, increasing the likelihood that some participants are joining after-hours in their time zone.
“And then I think just the business pressures are higher, and we saw that in the survey data,” she says. “In particular, over half of business leaders told us they need more productivity from their employees, so we are seeing this very rapid pace.”
Why AI Can’t Fix a Broken Meeting Culture
New AI tools could reduce late-night gatherings by allowing workers to send AI note takers in their place, or enable more asynchronous alternatives to real-time events. At the same time, Cambon warns that the technology alone won’t produce better meeting hygiene.
“Your meeting culture is your meeting culture, and unless you use AI very intentionally, nothing is really going to change,” she warns. “You have to figure out how to make your meeting culture better.”
At the same time, the technology is also putting more pressure on businesses to adapt, which often results in more meetings, not less.
“We’re seeing work shift in new ways, driven by AI, and from my perspective this has been an incredibly intensive time for workers and in particular workers in AI-native organizations,” says Dr. Rebecca Hinds, the head of the AI Work Institute for enterprise AI platform Glean and author of Your Best Meeting Ever. “There’s a pressure that I’ve never seen before, and we’re seeing more and more evidence that that is contributing to after-hours work.”
In the wake of the pandemic, some organizations used new remote collaboration tools to enable greater flexibility, while others used them to encroach on work-life boundaries, and Dr. Hinds warns that AI is no different.
“The more we have access to technology, the easier it is to schedule and attend a meeting, the more we’re going to do that in an environment where we don’t have a healthy, intentional meeting culture,” she says. “All of this is lowering the bar in terms of what it takes to schedule a meeting.”
Using technology to free your evenings
At the same time, Dr. Hinds says there are ways to use technology to promote work-life boundaries and free our evenings from work responsibilities.
For example, some tools allow workers to limit their meeting availability to working hours. Others automatically warn organizers when they’re scheduling a meeting after-hours for participants in other time-zones. Some will even flag when a meeting is likely to be ineffective, such as when there are too many participants, or a majority of invitations haven’t received a response.
Other tools, like AI note-takers, video messaging apps and digital collaboration tools are making it easier for workers to collaborate asynchronously, reducing their reliance on real-time conversations.
“Asynchronous is the name of the game in terms of decreasing our time spent in dysfunctional meetings,” Dr. Hinds says. “[As is] having clear norms around what is the purpose of each tool, what is the purpose of a meeting, and how should we be using meetings? That holds true for any time of day.”