With all the conversation around AI and making our lives easier, I think a lot of us breathed a quiet sigh of relief thinking that finally, someone had figured out how to make meeting minutes less of a pain. I've covered AI for meeting prep, my personal stack and how I use it in practice. One thing I haven't written about yet is using AI to produce the minutes themselves, mostly because I'm still working it out.

My current workflow looks something like this:

• Zoom records the meeting as an MP4 video file. Since AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can't process video, a transcript is the first step. Some AI tools have their own transcription feature built in, so it's worth checking before working through the steps below.
• Microsoft Word's transcription feature can get you there, but it has a 200MB file size limit and a two-hour meeting will almost certainly push past that. Converting the MP4 to an MP3 first brings the file size down enough to work with.
• Upload the MP3 to Microsoft Word and use the transcribe feature. A few minutes later you have a transcript. Note: this didn't work in the Word desktop app, but logging into Microsoft Word on the web did the trick.
• Once the transcript is ready, share that file with your AI and get to work.

This is a lot of work, and honestly probably harder than just replaying the audio at 2x speed and jotting down the important parts. But I wanted to see if it could be made to work, so I went through the motions.

The honest limitation is that AI still misses things, including action items, vote tallies and who moved what. Those aren't details you can afford to get wrong in official minutes, so human review isn't optional. It's the whole job.

That said, here's what I've learned about setting it up to work better.

Before the meeting even starts, there are three things worth having ready: your board roster with correct name spellings, the meeting agenda and a clear list of exactly what you need the AI to extract. That last one should include:

• Meeting name, date and location (or note that it was virtual)
• Opening and adjournment time
• Attendees
• Each action item
• Motion language
• Who moved and who seconded
• Outcome of the vote
• How each attendee voted

If this is occasional or a one-off, drop all of that into a new thread before uploading your transcript. But if you're doing this regularly, setting up a project folder is worth the time. Those of you who have read my other AI articles know I'm a fan of this approach. A project lets you establish all of those parameters once so that every time you need minutes, the rules are already in place and it's just a matter of uploading the transcript.

During the meeting, you almost have to narrate for the record. Introduce everyone clearly by name at the start. When you reach an action item, state it explicitly: "The action item is approving the June meeting minutes." When you get the motion and second, say it out loud: "Steve moved that we approve the June meeting minutes. Shannon seconded." It feels scripted, but that narration is what the transcript has to work with. The more natural and conversational the discussion, the more the AI has to guess. Also make sure anything important for the minutes is clean and clear. People talking over each other or ambient noise will interfere with the capture and you may lose something you can't get back.

After the meeting, the workflow kicks in. Convert the MP4 to an MP3, upload it to Word on the web to transcribe, then bring that transcript into your AI. If you set up a project, most of the parameters are already there and it's just a matter of letting it work. What comes back is a draft, not a finished product. The review pass is real work. There are usually things missing and when something doesn't show up, it helps to go back and ask directly: where is the vote tally for agenda item three, or what happened to action item two. Sometimes the AI finds it, sometimes the source material just wasn't clean enough to capture it. Either way, that back and forth is part of the process right now.

The secretary's eye on the final product isn't optional, but a solid workflow and improving tools mean AI has the potential to save meaningful time getting there. It's not magic and the problem isn't solved yet. But you'll be the first to know if I figure it out.

Let me know what's working for you and what's worth trying.

Toolkit
What AI Can and Can't Do for Your Board
How to Use AI to Prepare for Your Next Board Meeting

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