Using AI Tools to Make Meeting Minutes Magic!

Taking meeting minutes is like being a designated driver — you end up having a completely different experience than everyone else, but later, you’re the only one who knows what happened.

As I mentioned in our webinar on AI Meeting Minute Generators, meeting minutes are a necessary evil. You need them, but the attention required to produce them removes you from the real-time conversation. It also makes you feel like an admin — a "notetaker" image that is worlds away from the project leaders that we all aspire to be.

So, with that in mind, one would think that a lot of project managers would leap right into using AI tools to enhance and assist with meeting minutes. But according to a poll on ProjectManagement.com, almost 60 percent of respondents have not done so yet. But most non-users said they plan to try in the next three months.

For those thinking about testing AI tools for meeting minutes, we want to motivate you to try it sooner rather than later. I wouldn’t call it life-changing, but at a minimum it’s career-boosting, it’s personal brand-enhancing, and it’s a great learning experience. If you feel like it’s hard to take that next leap forward in how you operate, let’s get you motivated by looking at the task from different angles or ”needs.”

You Need an Easy AI Entry Point

There are so many AI tools and approaches out there. Knowing where to start can be difficult. Last month, we released a thought leadership paper describing how you can approach AI overall. Shaping the Future of Project Management With AI gives you a landscape view of where we are and how you can learn and play a role in this movement.

The figure below looks at how various AI tools help you deal with complexity and how much of the work you need to take on versus the machine. Note that meeting minutes (lower left) can be mostly handled by the machines with just a bit of cross checking and clean up from you. Using AI tools for meeting minutes is a simple, easy place to start.

You Need More Time

Using these AI tools will give you immediate breathing room. As mentioned below, they will help you lean into doing a better job, but for the moment, you could just take a breath. In our webinar, Keisha Lewis mentioned that for every hour she spent in a meeting, she usually took another hour to re-organize and clean up her notes. That was with the method she typically used, which involved rough, hand-typed notes during the meeting. If you use the transcription feature in any of these AI tools, you could potentially save nearly two hours for every hour of meeting time. Think about how many meetings you hold in a week. How many hours could you save?

You Need More from Your Meetings

We all want to perform well and get better over time. As I mentioned earlier, using meeting transcription will free you up to take part in the meeting. That means you can lead, manage, and focus on the conversation. You will add more value in a very visible way. It’s good for your projects—and good for your career.

But these tools can do even more than give you clean notes. In a matter of minutes (no pun intended), they will identify issues and actions, attributing them to individuals that commit to them in the conversation. They can also create summaries that are easy to digest and that can be audience-specific.

More advanced AI tools can:

• Translate the conversation in real time
• Identify contextual issues
• Identify persistent issues across meetings
• Report on emotional sentiment
• Measure engagement and more

You Need to Start Now

You can start making meeting minutes magic this week. See if any of the tools you already use at work have evolved to include meeting note related functions. For example, Microsoft Co-Pilot takes notes, summarizes them, identifies actions issues, and more. Google Workspace, Slack, and others have similar functionality.

Working with a familiar interface — pre-approved by your IT team — gives you an easy entry point with no security concerns. These tools typically walk you through the process step by step.

If an existing toolset is not an option and you’re starting from scratch, there are many general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Claude 2, and Perplexity that have free and paid versions available. If you’re going this route:

• Identify a low-stakes meeting where no confidential information will be disclosed.
• Use the transcription function in your existing collaboration platform to take notes or take them as you normally would using a word-processing tool.
• Simply copy and paste the transcription or your rough notes into a general purpose GPT and ask it to summarize the notes for you.

“Just doing it” will immerse you in the experience and show you how easy it is to try new prompts and approaches. In no time, you’ll be dreaming up other ways that generative AI can help you and your team become more effective. Soon you will find yourself becoming part of the movement — you’ll be shaping the future of project management with AI.

So, whether you’ve been waiting for the right entry point into AI, need a little breathing room, or just want to improve your personal performance, AI meeting minute generators are a gift that keeps on giving. They will help you know what’s happened every step of the way, while still being present in the moment — and maybe even the life of the party.

Check out more ways PMI can help you unlock the full potential of AI.

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