Can AI take better meeting notes than you?

Welcome to this edition of Prompt, Tinker, Innovate—my AI playground. Each edition, we dive into a practical AI use case, explore its significance, and give you a hands-on experiment.

Your mission? Try the prompt, experiment with variations, and adapt it to your work. Before you know it, you’ll be innovating with AI in your daily life—one playful experiment at a time.

This week’s playground: AI as your notetaker

Why this matters

We’ve all been there—juggling listening, participating, and taking notes during a call, only to realize we missed something crucial. AI-powered notetakers can extract key takeaways, action items, and insights from call transcripts, saving you time and ensuring no detail is overlooked.

Use Case Spotlight: AI for personalized notes

What’s happening?

AI is transforming meeting productivity by generating structured, easy-to-read notes from raw transcripts. Notetakers in Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, as well as standalone tools like Granola, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai, can summarize conversations, highlight decisions, and even detect follow-up tasks. This means professionals no longer need to sift through lengthy call recordings—AI does the heavy lifting.

However, not all companies enable AI-powered meeting notetakers due to privacy policies or compliance concerns. That said, many organizations allow meeting transcripts, which can be just as (or even more) valuable. With a transcript in hand, you can ask AI specific questions that matter most to you—tailoring insights to your unique needs. Even if your company provides AI-generated notes, getting the full transcript gives you more control and context, ensuring nothing is lost in summarization.

Your AI experiment: Try this prompt

👉 Time to tinker: Copy and paste the following prompt into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or your favorite AI tool.

📝 Prompt: “You are a professional meeting assistant with expertise in summarizing discussions and extracting action items. Your goal is to generate a structured, clear, and concise meeting summary from the following transcript. The summary should include: 1) Key discussion points, 2) decisions made, 3) action items with assigned owners (if mentioned), 4) any unresolved questions or follow-ups needed, and 5) the next steps [insert name] should take. Here’s the transcript: [Insert transcript text here]”

💡 Pro tip: Want to refine the output? Try these adjustments:

• "Summarize each speaker’s main contributions to the discussion."

• "Find areas where participants had differing opinions."

• "List any open-ended questions that remain unanswered."

What did you discover?

Did AI capture the key points accurately, or did it miss something important? How did it compare to your own note-taking? Reply and share your experience.

See you next week for another AI experiment.