How AI Notetakers Can Help Create Your Next Meeting Minutes

Meeting minutes are a written summary of a meeting or business discussion that helps provide future reminders and documentation on the discussion. They document important topics, decisions made in a meeting, and action items assigned to meeting participants. Since recording every aspect of the meeting takes focus and concentration, assigning a dedicated person or an AI notetaker to perform this task is essential.

Generating high quality meeting minutes can be achieved by creating and following a standardized process. Here are five tips that will help get you started:

1. Create an agenda as part of pre-planning: Having a well-organized meeting that follows a plan will make the task of taking meeting minutes much easier. 

2. Create a document with high-level meeting information: This includes people at the meeting, the date and time of the meeting, and the agenda as mentioned above. Ideally, this document is in a shared knowledge base that meeting participants can access. 

3. Assign a dedicated notetaker: It's recommended to have someone own the task of reviewing and cleaning up recorded meeting minutes directly after the meeting while the events are still fresh. 

4. Approve the minutes: An optional step is meeting minutes approved. In certain meeting types, such as board meetings, it's a requirement to get the meeting lead or chairperson to approve the minutes. 

5. Distribute the minutes: The last step is to distribute the minutes to the meeting participants and add them to the company wiki or cloud drive. 

Good minutes are not simply a verbose transcription of everything said in the meeting. Here are actions you want to take when preparing meeting minutes:

• Record specific items that participants are assigned.

• Capture decisions made by the meeting participants. 

• Make sure to record how people feel, what they are saying, and why they are saying it.

• Other critical events and prominent positions the participants may have.

There are many different formats for taking minutes, and the density of the notes can vary based on the meeting type and how the information is in use after the event. 

Brief meeting minutes are short notes about the meeting. They are also called "open notes" and focus on decisions or action items that participants agree to work on individually. These short notes are great for a call recap or an aid when writing email follow-ups or entering data into the CRM. 

Detailed meeting minutes are long notes about the meeting. This format is most valuable for meetings when information is shared with other stakeholders who didn't attend the meeting and needed more context. These notes help stakeholders save time by not having to re-listen to the meeting.

Verbatim extracts aren't meeting minutes but rather excerpts from a transcript. While these can often be a challenge to read, they hold the exact details of the meeting timespan. 

Once minutes have been written, they can be leveraged in a variety of ways to provide stakeholders in your team, customer base, or your company's management team informed. Here are some ways meeting minutes can be leveraged once properly prepared:

1. Update your CRM:

For client-facing meetings, such as sales calls or customer reviews, keeping the CRM updated and management informed is required. Adding meeting minutes to the CRM is a great way to track the customer relationship and stay informed on the customer status. 

2. Help with follow up emails:

Follow-up emails are an essential part of keeping meeting participants on the same page. Most successful consultants, project managers, and client-facing reps send a follow-up email outlining key takeaways, decisions, and next steps. Have meeting minutes as a starting point and reference makes the follow-up email more accurate. 

3. Keep management informed:

Good meeting minutes are vital information for leadership because they can leverage the minutes to understand the progress of their business. They can see how their employees are performing, what challenges the company has, and develop a strategic path forward. 

4. Improve client relationships:

Good meeting minutes help improve client relationships by providing a better understanding of client needs. By tailoring the service or solution to meet the customer's needs and making good on their commitments, a company builds trust and validates its commitment to the client.  

5. Increase accountability:

If there is a written record of what was discussed and decided in a meeting, participants are more likely to follow up on their actions and report back with results. The process of recording increases accountability and enables management to track progress and follow up with the team members.

Taking notes and preparing minutes manually is a high effort task, but AI notetakers reduce the friction and human effort in creating meeting minutes. Benefits of using AI systems in meeting minutes preparation include:

Dedicated AI notetaker:

• AI notetakers don't have schedule conflicts or other priorities, making them available when you are. They are also affordable when compared to a dedicated professional's hourly rate, and they don't tire in long meetings and have consistent performance.

• They allow all the meeting participants to stay focused and active in the meeting. 

Creates both a verbatim transcript and meeting minutes:

• AI notetakers can automatically generate many assets to help facilitate a variety of use cases. These assets can include a complete text transcription linked to a video recording, various sets of meeting minutes and topic roll-ups .

• An AI notetaker can also use summarization techniques to generate an easy-to-read list of meeting minutes written in a consistent format. 

Automates distribution:

• These AI assistants automate the distribution of meeting minutes by posting them to the company knowledge base, CRM, or sending them to the participants via email.  

A good AI engine generates minutes for every meeting using AI advanced AI techniques to transform call transcripts into a commonly formatted bulleted list of events. They eliminate disfluencies and other problematic speech by consolidating the noisy transcript into a list of key events. 

An AI summarization engine must generate a brief set of key events and a more detailed set of meeting minutes. In every scenario, the meeting minutes should link back to the video playback and text transcript, providing the user the opportunity to dig in further and understand the exact moment of the call. 

AI notetakers can help by automating the distribution process and sending brief meeting minutes to internal call participants. A rep can save time by posting the quick minutes in the CRM or other applications used by the company.

Meeting minutes are essential for business meetings; they record the discussion, decisions made, and action items assigned to meeting participants. AI notetakers can help automate the recording of meeting minutes so that all attendees can participate in the meeting. They also save time by compiling all the information into a simple format that is easy to review and distributed automatically.