Answers from people who could not join

Jaha notices when a person who was invited but did not join is named in a question — spoken in the call, or @mentioned in the meeting chat. What it does next depends on what it can actually stand behind.

If they left notes that cover the question, Jaha answers on their behalf and says so. If not, it says so plainly and puts the question to them. If they declined and nominated somebody else, the question goes to that person instead. And if they are away, Jaha tells the room rather than sending a message nobody will read today.

Anyone can leave a brief before a meeting they will miss: their position on the agenda, the numbers people are likely to ask for, whatever they would have said. Jaha answers from it, always prefaced with whose words these are.

The threshold for using a brief is deliberately strict. A wrong answer attributed to an absent colleague is a fabrication in their name, and they are not in the room to correct it — so where the brief does not clearly cover the question, Jaha says the notes do not cover it rather than stretching them.

The question reaches them in Outlook, as a Teams message, and in their Jaha inbox. They can reply from a phone in a few sentences — and before replying they can ask Jaha what was said in the meeting up to that point, so the answer is informed rather than guessed.

They choose how it arrives: posted in the meeting chat, or spoken aloud by Jaha on their behalf while the call is still live. If the meeting has ended, it lands in the chat instead of vanishing.

Somebody who was asked but is not the right person can pass the question on by naming a colleague. It leaves their inbox and arrives with the new person carrying the name of who sent it, so nobody receives an out-of-nowhere demand from a meeting they were never in.

People explain themselves when they decline an invitation. “Can’t make it — ask Priya, she has the full context” is an instruction from the only person entitled to give it, and Jaha follows it: the question goes to Priya, with the name of who nominated her attached.

Only an explicitly named person is ever used. Jaha will not infer a stand-in from your org chart, and where a nominated name matches two colleagues it treats that as no match at all — asking the wrong Priya is worse than asking nobody, because the right one never learns she was needed.

Somebody who declined because they are on leave is not notified at all. The message would sit unread until they were back, and a notification that arrives when nobody can act on it is how people learn to ignore notifications. The room is told they are away instead.

Somebody in back-to-back meetings is asked, because they can answer later — but the room is told not to wait for it during the call.

Repeated mentions of the same person in the same meeting collapse into one pending question rather than a stream of them. And a question is never sent to a name that does not resolve to a real colleague: a message fired at a string looks delivered and reaches nobody.

The meeting’s People tab lists every question put to somebody who was not there: who was asked, whether they answered, what they said, and — where it applies — who nominated them or passed it on.

A question still waiting shows why a reply may be slow, drawn from the person’s own decline. A question nobody could be asked about shows that too. The point is that whoever asked can always tell what became of it, rather than wondering whether they were ignored.

The same tab shows how each invitee responded to the invitation — accepted, declined, tentative, or no reply — alongside the reason they gave. Somebody who accepted and then did not appear is a different situation from somebody who declined a day earlier, and only one of them is worth chasing mid-meeting.