Introduction

Background

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a critical role in Vietnam’s economic landscape. Accounting for more than 97% of all businesses nationwide, SMEs contribute approximately 45% of the country’s GDP, 31% of the national budget, and provide jobs for over 5 million workers. As the backbone of the economy, SMEs supply essential products and services to both domestic and international markets, helping drive sustainable growth and innovation.

Global AI Trends

Artificial intelligence is rapidly shaping the future of global industries. The worldwide AI market is valued at approximately USD 391 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow nearly fivefold by 2030, with a CAGR of around 35.9%.

Within this landscape, AI-powered meeting assistant tools represent one of the fastest-growing segments—expected to rise from USD 2.68 billion in 2024 to USD 24.6 billion in 2034 (CAGR ~24.8%).

AI has become an inevitable global trend, and AI-driven solutions are significantly accelerating economic productivity. Virtual meeting assistant technologies, in particular, have gained widespread adoption worldwide.

In Vietnam, however, similar solutions exist only in limited forms and are not yet fully developed or widely implemented—highlighting a substantial gap and opportunity in the market.

What Is a Meeting Assistant?

A Meeting Assistant is an AI-powered tool designed to join online meetings as a virtual participant. It performs intelligent support tasks such as recording audio, generating subtitles, translating speech, storing meeting content, and automatically summarizing discussions.

These capabilities help SMEs streamline meeting workflows and enhance communication, collaboration, knowledge retention, and documentation efficiency—ultimately improving productivity across teams and organizations.

Project Overview

Challenges

Vietnamese SMEs are facing a range of operational and management challenges that directly impact their efficiency and competitiveness. With limited resources, many businesses struggle to adopt digital tools—57.6% of SMEs report difficulties in digital transformation due to constraints in time and manpower, according to Minh et al. (2024), while the World Bank (2025) highlights similar barriers across the sector. Communication and collaboration issues further hinder productivity: meetings are often poorly documented, lack a dedicated note-taker, or result in inaccurate records. 

As a consequence, important information is not stored or shared effectively, leading to forgotten tasks, duplicated work, and weak accountability in progress tracking. At the same time, more SMEs are expanding their cross-border collaborations, but language barriers make meetings inefficient, and hiring interpreters remains costly and inflexible. These challenges collectively reduce productivity, increase operating costs due to rework or missed deadlines, and weaken SMEs’ ability to compete with larger or digitally advanced organizations. This context creates an urgent need for a lightweight, low-cost, high-impact technology solution that is easy to implement and directly enhances daily operations.

Solution

MIA is an AI-powered Meeting Assistant designed to optimize the entire online meeting process for SMEs, making collaboration smarter, faster, and more efficient.

Before the Meeting – Smart Scheduling

MIA helps users schedule meetings effortlessly. You can simply talk to the bot in natural language, for example, “Schedule a team meeting next Tuesday afternoon.” The bot automatically checks everyone’s availability, suggests the best time slots based on participants’ schedules and preferences, and sends out invitations to all attendees. This ensures meetings are scheduled efficiently, saving time and avoiding conflicts.

During the Meeting – Real-time Support

MIA actively assists during the meeting to enhance communication and understanding. It records the entire meeting, provides live subtitles in the original language, and translates them into over 60 languages. Users can also type what they want to say, and the bot can speak for them or instantly translate their speech into the meeting language. These features ensure that all participants can follow the discussion, even in cross-border or multilingual contexts.

After the Meeting – Smart Follow-up

After the meeting, MIA automatically generates AI-powered summaries highlighting key discussion points and decisions. It extracts tasks, assigns them to responsible team members with deadlines, and tracks progress in real time. Full meeting videos are also stored for review, allowing participants to revisit discussions they may have missed. This workflow helps SMEs improve accountability, reduce duplicated work, and ensure tasks are completed on time.

Overall, MIA provides a lightweight, low-cost, and high-impact solution that transforms the meeting experience, streamlines workflow, and boosts productivity for SMEs.

Expected Outcomes:

MIA is expected to deliver significant benefits across economic, social, and technological perspectives. Economically, it helps SMEs optimize operational costs, improve workforce efficiency, expand market reach, overcome language barriers, and integrate into global supply chains, while promoting domestic economic growth, Vietnamese tech branding, and contributing to the national digital economy. From a cultural and social perspective, MIA fosters a shift from frequent meetings to more effective meetings, enhances transparency and accountability, supports work-life balance, enables remote work, reduces urban commuting stress, provides equal access to technology for remote regions and people with disabilities, and ensures data sovereignty. 

Technologically, MIA accelerates digital transformation through affordable AI solutions, integrates with existing platforms, digitizes workflows, develops employees’ digital skills, fosters data-driven decision-making, builds domestic technological autonomy, and promotes a culture of innovation, positioning SMEs for first-mover advantage in the regional market.

Conclusion

The MIA Meeting Assistant demonstrates how AI-powered solutions can transform the way SMEs manage their meetings and daily operations. By addressing key challenges such as limited resources, inefficient communication, and barriers to international collaboration, MIA streamlines scheduling, enhances real-time meeting support, and ensures effective follow-up. Economically, it helps reduce operational costs, improve workforce efficiency, and expand business opportunities globally. Socially, it promotes a culture of transparency, accountability, and work-life balance, while providing equitable access to technology across regions and demographics. Technologically, MIA fosters digital transformation, builds AI literacy, supports data-driven decision-making, and strengthens domestic technological autonomy.

Looking ahead, further project directions could include integrating MIA with more enterprise platforms such as ERP, HR, and project management tools, enhancing AI capabilities for predictive analytics and meeting insights, expanding multilingual support for even broader international collaboration, and developing industry-specific modules tailored for sectors like e-commerce, manufacturing, or finance. These expansions can reinforce SMEs’ competitiveness, accelerate digital adoption, and further contribute to Vietnam’s growing digital economy.