Less employees equals less overhead. Less overhead means lower cost. Cost could be said to be "work" monetized. So less employees equals less work in the long run, shadow or not.
At the same company, meetings typically had an official "minute taker" in attendance and a couple of days later our in-trays (physical) would contain beautifully typed and formatted minutes. I now work at a large bureaucratic software company, typically the person taking notes at a meeting: a) does a terrible job; b) earns upwards of $100K; c) contributes little meaningful to the meeting (a and c are sometimes inversely correlated). Having a pool of people who were good at taking notes and weren't attempting or pretending to participate at the same time might end up being more cost effective
If you put that much more clearly (not recorded) into the ear of someone who is physically in the room and is somewhat accustomed to listening to the personalities involved, perhaps rudimentarily familiar with technical vocabulary, names of the participants, proper nouns in which the discussion commonly traffics, etc., it might stand a chance.
If you think sending a recording of a 12-person strategy session to an off-shore non-native English speaker would actually work, my guess is that you have not tried it. :-)