Anyone who has taken meeting minutes will know how laborious this can be and can actually distract you from participating and intervening in the meeting.
Yet, this is an essential job for business efficiency and productivity to capture, store and disseminate the key points and actions discussed.
And the notetaker is quite influential. Taking from George Orwell, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
There are several AI notetakers out there. We use Microsoft CoPilot because of its integration with Teams. Turn on Record and Transcribe, then use CoPilot to summarise the meeting, decisions and action points.
As with most things ‘AI’ at present, this gets you 80 – 85% of the way, with you topping off the rest manually. But, that is still a HUGE timesaving.
I have subtly adapted my meeting speech to play to the notetaker. For example, clearly summarising, “That’s a Decision we will adopt the proposal to do X”, or “The Action point is for Fred to come back to us by 10 March with an update on Y”.
This way, I know CoPilot is going to feed that back as nice Decision and Action single lines.
A further interesting and beneficial side effect is that you can get a feel for how productive your meeting has been and you as a group.
If you come out of a two – or three-hour meeting and CoPilot summarises the transcript into four or five paragraphs, then that’s an indicator that the group spent the meeting kicking the can down the road on various points instead of making decisions…
I suppose the really cleverest AI in the future would have captured all the offline backroom politicking in advance of the meeting and summarised in advance the ‘decisions’ that the meeting is to pretend they are vigorously debating and agreeing to 😁
How are your experiences with AI notetaking bots?