Recently, I blogged about considerations to ponder when deciding which situations are appropriate to use AI to help you take notes. I offered the reasons why it’s never appropriate to use AI to take notes at board and board committee meetings (and I also noted that corporate secretaries should bake AI into their board meeting compliance warnings).
But there are plenty of situations where AI can truly be invaluable to help you take notes, such as internal meetings with fellow employees where the AI is “sandboxed,” meaning that the content you input into the AI doesn’t leave your employer’s network (and thus is not used to train the large language model (LLM) that is being used).
Here’s an example of how you might use AI with someone that you manage, as told to me by one of my in-house friends about how he uses AI in this context:
“It can help you draft summary notes after personnel meetings to upload into your employee’s Workday records. It also produces a list of follow-up action items for your team member. That allows you to focus on the conversation. The AI remembers your prior discussions and can suggest topics for periodic ‘touch base’ meetings. You can ask the team member for permission before inviting the AI into the meeting. You then explain in advance how you will be using the output. Of course, you shouldn’t rely entirely on the AI. It produces a draft.
The AI version that you use probably can be integrated with OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook or Teams, so you can have the AI correlate a meeting summary with other information on the same project or related to the same employee.
Before the meeting, it can look at your email and chat conversations with the employee and identify topics for weekly one-on-one meetings or topics where you’ve provided performance coaching for follow-up. For example, how well did the recent project status report align with project plan commitments?
Another example: You can ask the AI how well the team member’s Workday objectives are aligned with your leadership’s priorities and whether they meet SMART goal guidelines, then suggest an outline of coaching topics for your upcoming goals alignment conversation. AI then attends the meeting and produces the summary.”
Authored by
Broc Romanek