The AI in Your Meeting Just Started Talking

Fireflies.ai started as a bot that sat in your meetings and took notes. Passive. Inert. The digital equivalent of the intern who's not sure if they're supposed to be here.

That product just hit a billion-dollar valuation.

Now they've added Perplexity as an active meeting participant — not a notetaker, not a transcript, but something that joins the call and can answer questions in real time. You're mid-meeting arguing about whether a competitor launched something last quarter, and instead of someone tabbing out to Google, an entity on the call already knows.

This is the progression. Passive AI first — it listens, it records, it summarizes after. Then active AI — it's in the room, it has opinions, it can be addressed directly. The notetaker became a colleague.

What's interesting isn't the Perplexity integration specifically, it's what $1B says about the underlying premise. Somebody valued "AI in your meetings" at ten figures, which means the market has decided that the meeting is a surface worth owning — not just the output of the meeting, not the calendar, not the follow-up email, but the meeting itself, in real time.

The passive phase was a trojan horse. This was always the destination.