A recent Wall Street Journal story confirmed what you already know: Everything is being recorded. Meetings, one-on-ones, hallway chats, and even dates live on in your permanent file somewhere in Otter, Zoom, or Granola. The technology lets you relive your meetings forever, which most people would call the Tenth Circle of Hell.
Granted, AI notetakers have their uses. They save you time by summarizing meetings, capturing action items, and sending out meeting notes automatically. That’s fine, but it doesn’t make your meetings any better.
So dig deeper. There’s more to these tools, properly used. As an executive coach, I’ve seen smart companies turn notetakers into thought partners that improve your meetings, your team dynamics, and even your own leadership.
Two caveats. If you’re recording a meeting, make sure everyone consents. And notetakers don’t solve the larger problems of too many meetings and poor quality meetings. If the meeting should have been a quick conversation or even an email, artificial intelligence can’t save it.
But if a notetaker is in the room anyway, you might as well use it to its full potential. Here are five ways to use AI to improve your meetings.
1. Reflect on your meetings
One of the best ways to use an AI recording is as a mirror. Look at the summaries and the action items and reflect: Did the meeting help you make enough progress to justify all the time spent? Are decisions being made or are the same topics looping back over and over again? Are there too many people in the meeting or not the right people?
Do an honest assessment of the value of your meetings and make changes based on that. One of my CEO clients reviewed his regular staff meeting and realized that almost no decisions were getting made there. He asked his team to start bringing more pointed topics that they wanted to debate and decide with the whole team, and then prioritized them on the agenda. He encouraged them to challenge each other and him. The meetings became a lot more dynamic and several core issues that were holding the team up got resolved.
2. Score your meetings
One of the frustrations of meetings is that they take up a lot of time and don’t necessarily accrue a lot of value. As a coach I know that’s often because of the lack of simple meeting hygiene. Meetings should have a clear goal and a clear agenda. Everyone in the meeting should have a role. Otherwise, why are they in the meeting? And the meeting should end with actions and owners.
Easy to say, but be honest: Are you really that rigorous? AI helps you assess that. Give the AI the criteria you want to use for your meetings and ask it to weigh in on how well you achieved your own standard.
You can start with the 4R Framework I created to test whether a meeting is even worth having. Ask your notetaker if one of your standing meetings 1) Reviewed progress, 2) Resolved problems, 3) Refined strategy or decisions, or 4) Reinforced alignment. If it didn’t, good news: You can cancel this meeting!
Add in standards you want to use, such as:
- Was there a clear goal and clear agenda?
- How many people in the room spoke?
- Was there clear debate and disagreement? If everyone agrees you probably don’t need to meet.
- Did the meeting end with decisions, next steps, and owners?
Use these as a starter set, then ask AI where you fell short and how to raise your score.
3. Review team dynamics
When you’re in meetings, you’re focused on the content and trying to move the ball forward. You don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to notice the subtle nuances of team dynamics. But your notetaker does. And you can use those insights to improve your understanding of your team dynamics and how to help the team work better together.
One of my clients turned Granola on during a strategy session. After the session he asked the tool about culture and participation. He discovered that two team members dominated conversations while others held back. He used that insight to ask people to do more extensive prework before the next strategy sessions. Then he called on people deliberately to participate. There were many more ideas generated at that session and the energy to execute on them was much higher.
When you use this tool you can ask these questions: Who spoke the least? Who spoke the most? Whose ideas got dropped without any discussion? Are there red flags, like tension between two people or a topic the group keeps steering around, that I should look into further?
Use the answers as ideas to follow up on, rather than grounded facts. They’ll point you to places where you should probe more in your team. Perhaps you should check in with the person who spoke the least and see if they need more encouragement. Or you might want to probe more deeply for signs of tension if the notetaker flags that as an issue.
4. Get feedback on your own style
Whether you’re leading a meeting or participating, one of the most valuable ways to improve how you come across is to get feedback on how you’re showing up. It’s hard to get this from other humans since they’re focusing on their own needs. And, let’s face it, giving honest feedback can be hard.
But AI has no problem giving you the straight scoop on how you might be showing up. You can run the meeting transcript through an AI tool and ask it questions like: “How clear was I?” or “How much did I speak versus listen?” If you’re working on being more empathetic you can ask it if you succeeded. If you’re working on being more direct you can ask it to score you on your directness and give you tips to improve.
One of my clients took the transcript of the meeting, put it into Claude, and found out that he made great use of metaphors. He also learned that he could improve his translation of those metaphors into clear actions that he wanted his team to take. He used this to open up a discussion with his team about this, which was fruitful in its own right, and they gave him very helpful suggestions. This conversation also gave them all a green light to ask him for more clarity and direction in real time during the meeting.
5. Improve processes within your company
Using AI to help yourself and your team improve is very powerful. But a real unlock occurs when you can use it to examine and upgrade processes across your whole company.
At a fast-growing tech company, a recruiter noticed that one engineer seemed to be an outstanding talent spotter. Every time this engineer interviewed a candidate and gave him a strong yes, the person got hired and turned out to be a high performer.
So this recruiter got curious about the interactions this engineer had with the candidates. Since the meetings were recorded, he pulled the transcripts, dropped them into Claude, and asked for insights. The findings were specific and useful. For example, successful candidates balanced short-term and long-term trade-offs in their answers, and they asked clarifying questions before they started answering.
Using this and other insights, the recruiter drove changes in the company’s training processes that improved hiring substantially.
No matter how you feel about AI notetakers, they’re not going away. So find a way to put them to work for you to help you get deeper insights on your meetings, your team, and yourself.