The minutes nobody wants to write

Let me guess how meeting minutes work in your business.

Someone gets lumbered with taking notes while trying to actually contribute to the meeting. They type them up days later when half of it has gone fuzzy. The document goes round, captures most of what was said, misses some of what was agreed and everyone pretends that's fine. That’s how we always done it anyway.

Nobody's doing it badly. The task itself is broken. You can be in the conversation or you can document it. Pick one.

I sit on a regional group within an external organisation. A room full of people talking suppliers, pricing and the state of the market. We had exactly this problem and we fixed it in about an hour. Here's exactly how, so you can steal it.

And before you think "that's nice for board meetings" stop. This works for any meeting anywhere. Sales meetings, toolbox talks, management catch-ups, your golf club committee, the school PTA. If people talk and decisions get made, this applies.

We use a Plaud, a small device that sits on the table and spits out a full transcript through its app - anyone can use it and they are cheap as chips, I have a couple of them. A phone with a transcription app does the same job. Only rule though: make sure everyone in the room knows it's recording and is ok with that.

The raw transcript is a mess. A dozen accents, people talking over each other, ten minutes about the football. Doesn't matter. It's raw material.

This is the part people overcomplicate, so read this bit twice.

ChatGPT and Claude both have a feature called Projects. It's a workspace where you save files and instructions permanently. Set it up once and it's there forever. You do this ONE time. Then you never do it again unless something pivotal changes, like new members joining or a new format you want.

Total time for us: about an hour. Most of that was thinking, not typing.

We loaded two things in.

A member roster. Name, business, role, for everyone who attends. Plus a note on how names get mangled in transcripts, because the software will happily turn one name into three different people. With the roster loaded, the AI matches speakers to real humans instead of writing "unknown speaker" forty times. Click Projects on the left menu in your chosen AI then click New Project - it will ask for instructions and allow you to upload files. upload a word doc with the information mentioned here

Standing instructions. A plain written description of what good minutes look like for us:

Honest admission: writing that down was the most useful hour of the whole thing. Decades of holding meetings and we'd never once defined what a good set of minutes actually looks like. Most businesses never have. Have you?

Minutes of work instead of hours. And step 4 isn't optional. The AI gets the shape right and occasionally a detail wrong. You do the judgement. It does the typing.

It gets better every single time you use it.

Every correction you make, tell it. "That was Gerry, not Gary." "Stop putting discussion points under decisions." It remembers within the project, and next month's draft needs fewer fixes than this month's. You're training an assistant that knows your meetings, your people and your standards and it compounds.

Everyone hunts for their first AI win in the flashy stuff. Chatbots, forecasting etc. Big transformation programmes are hard, they're risky and when they stall, AI gets quietly shelved in your business for another year while your competitors overtyake you.

Minutes are the opposite. Everyone hates the task. The output only needs to be accurate. The time saved shows up in week one, and the sceptics see it without anyone giving a presentation. And the confidence from that small win will carry you on to bigger things.

An hour of setup. One meeting to test it. Done.

Try it this week then hit reply and tell me what happened. The replies have been the best bit of doing this.