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Drafting meeting minutes with AI

AI usage: AI transcribes the meeting and produces a draft of minutes and action items. A human (you) verifies the transcript, corrects the draft, and decides what is actioned. AI does not decide what anyone committed to; people do.

What you will do

  • Produce complete, shareable minutes within 30 minutes of a meeting ending.
  • End up with an action-item list that names owners and due dates.
  • Keep the workflow reproducible: same prompts every time, stored in your workflow library.

Before you start

  • A recording or live transcript of the meeting. Most meeting platforms (Teams, Zoom, Meet) can generate a transcript automatically once transcription is enabled.
  • Permission to record: tell participants and honor no-record requests.
  • A private workspace for the raw transcript (it is personal data).

Steps

1. Get the transcript

Enable automatic transcription in your meeting tool, or upload the recording to a transcription service. Export the transcript as plain text when the meeting ends.

Wait one or two minutes for processing before exporting; transcripts still being generated produce truncated minutes.

2. Draft minutes with AI

Paste the transcript into your AI assistant and run this prompt:

You are an experienced executive assistant. From the transcript below, produce meeting minutes with these sections: Participants, Decisions, Discussion summary (no more than 3 bullet lines per topic), Action items (owner + due date + what), and Open questions. Do not invent commitments; quote only what was said. Keep the tone neutral.

Review the output against the transcript. AI will occasionally invent a plausible owner or date — strike anything you cannot verify.

3. Verify action items with a human pass

The most valuable step: go through each action item and check the owner is a real person who agreed, and the due date is what the room agreed. Where the transcript is ambiguous (someone said "I'll do it" without a name), mark it UNASSIGNED and raise it at the next meeting rather than guessing.

4. Share the minutes

Paste the final minutes into the meeting notes tool you use. Link the supporting transcript for anyone who wants the full record. Send action items to the owners in the thread — do not rely on people reading the notes.

5. Store the prompt

Save the prompt from step 2 in your team's workflow library so the next meeting is one step: paste a transcript, edit the result. If the same prompt produces good output twice, you have a repeatable playbook; if not, fix the prompt before scaling it.

Review checklist

  • Transcript came from a source participants were told about
  • Action items all have owners; UNASSIGNED items are flagged, not guessed
  • Decisions match what the room decided; nothing invented
  • Sensitive content (comp, personal) kept out of shared minutes

Run it

  • Time: 20–30 minutes for a 60-minute meeting (5 min AI, 10 min human verification, 5 min distribution)
  • Repeat: after every meeting you own
  • Store: final minutes in your meeting-notes tool; transcripts in the workspace; the prompt in the workflow library