How do you use AI to summarise documents and meetings?

Ask for a specific shape

A request to summarise this gets you a vague paragraph. A request with a shape gets something you can use. For a team meeting, ask for the decisions made, the actions with an owner and a due date, the open questions, and any risks. For a long supplier email, ask what they want you to do and by when.

Where something was not said, tell the assistant to write not stated. Otherwise it may fill the gap with a guess that looks like a fact, such as an owner nobody named or a date nobody agreed.

Long documents, contracts and manuals

Assistants tend to read the start and the end of a long document better than the middle, and a summary will not tell you what it skimmed. Work in sections. Ask a specific question, such as what this section says about payment terms, rather than for the whole thing at once.

Ask it to quote the passage and give the page, and ask what is missing that you would expect to see. Then read those passages yourself. A summary of a sixty-page agreement is a starting point, never the reading, and the person who signs still reads the clauses that matter.

Meetings and calls

Note-taking tools record a meeting or call, write it up, and list the actions. They save the most time on sales calls, site visits, client meetings and internal meetings where nobody wants to take notes. Send the notes to the customer or job record, not to a separate app nobody opens.

The summary is a draft. Whoever ran the meeting reads the action list before it goes out, because a misheard name or number becomes a task for the wrong person.

Tell people, and decide where recordings go

Rules on recording calls depend on where the people on the call are, and in some places everyone must agree. Say at the start that the call is recorded and summarised, let people object, and have any note-taking tool announce itself. Rules differ by state and country, so check with a lawyer for your own case.

Decide where recordings and transcripts are stored, for how long, and who can read them. For sensitive talks, such as a client's finances, a patient or a staff matter, decide whether a recording tool should be in the room at all.

What to do this week

Pick one meeting that happens every week and use the same four headings each time. For the first month, compare the summary against your own memory before anyone acts on it. For a long document, try the section method on one you already know well, and see what the summary missed. That tells you how far to trust it.