Awesome Meetings

Meetings have tripled in the past four years, and the vast majority of us label most of them "unproductive. For SMBs with limited resources, every wasted meeting hour is an hour not spent growing your business.

But what if meetings could actually drive your business forward instead of holding it back?

In Issue #4, we covered capturing transcripts; if you haven't set that up yet, go back and start there. Now it's time to transform those transcripts into a complete meeting intelligence system that makes every gathering count.

Here's how.

Step 1:
Pre-Meeting Prep

The first step is to consistently capture meeting transcripts, but that's just the foundation. Many businesses hit their first snag on the next step: how do you organize everything so AI can actually help?

The reality is messy. Some of your work revolves around projects such as a website redesign or a new product launch. Some centers on clients or customers, such as everything related to your biggest account. And then there's the murky middle - that strategic planning meeting that touches three projects and five clients.

There's no one-size-fits-all answer here. 

What matters is that you pick a system and stick with it long enough to see if it works. Some considerations:

• If you're project-heavy (construction, consulting, agencies), you might organize by project with client sub-folders. If you're client-centric (accounting, legal, ongoing services), flip that structure. If you're in the messy middle, you might need both structures with smart cross-referencing.
• The key principle: everything related to a meeting should be findable by both humans and AI. That means consistent naming, logical hierarchies, and minimal scattered files. Your AI assistant can only be as organized as your information architecture.

For more on leveraging generative AI in project management, check out this prior issue of AI for SMBs Weekly.

AI-Powered Meetings

Before your next project team meeting, fire up your Project Assistant jig.

Hopefully, you're already using jigs to help supercharge project management. Depending on how you've set things up, you may want to build a new jig specific to a project or bake this into an existing project planning jig you've build. I don't recommend building a jig just to help plan a meeting; layer this into something else you'll be using. 

Try custom instructions like:

Your knowledge includes all project documents, past meeting
transcripts, and current status.

When I ask for help preparing for a meeting, you will:

1. Generate focused agendas based on project progress

2. Identify key decisions that need to be made

3. Surface relevant past decisions and context

4. Suggest questions to drive the discussion forward

5. Create pre-work assignments for attendees

Always prioritize outcomes over activities. Every agenda
item should move the project forward.

Upload your project brief, timeline, past transcripts, and any relevant documents. If you're using a generative AI model that can connect directly to your shared drive, make sure to specify where all of the project files live, or remember to add new files to this project over time. Now you have a dedicated AI assistant that understands your project's full context.

Before your next project meeting, prompt it:

We're having our weekly project sync tomorrow. Based on last week's action items and current blockers, create an agenda that will get us unstuck and moving forward.

Within seconds, you'll have an agenda that actually reflects where your project stands and not some generic template. It might surface forgotten commitments, highlight dependencies you hadn't considered, or suggest bringing in a stakeholder you'd overlooked.

Step 2:
During the Meeting

Instead of furiously typing notes and missing the actual conversation, you'll use AI as your active meeting partner. 

Yes, your AI is capturing every word (thanks to those transcripts). But it can do so much more during the meeting itself:

• Real-time fact-checking: "What did we decide about pricing in the January meeting?"
• Instant research: "What are our competitors doing about this issue?"
• Pattern recognition: "This sounds similar to the challenge we faced in Project Atlas"
• Decision tracking: Automatically flags when someone makes a commitment

While you can't (yet) actually invite your AI into the meeting, leveraging it during the meeting can be incredibly powerful. 

The Show-Don't Tell Revolution

We're in the era of "vibe coding" - where you can create as fast as you can describe. Pull up Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini during your meeting and turn ideas into reality in real-time.

Planning a new customer workflow? Don't just talk about it. Build a simple flowchart during the meeting. "Let me map out what this would look like..." and suddenly everyone's looking at the actual process, spotting gaps you'd never catch in abstract discussion.

Debating website changes? Generate mockups on the fly. "What if we moved the testimonials here?" becomes "Let me show you that layout right now." Decisions happen faster when you're looking at reality, not imagination.

Designing a new report template? Create it during the meeting. By the time you're done discussing requirements, you have a working template, not just a list of wishes.

Restructuring your team? Build the org chart live. Watch confusion disappear as people see the reporting lines visualized in real-time.

Modern AI tools can create prototypes from natural language descriptions. You literally describe what you want, and it appears on screen.

The psychological shift is profound. When someone says "I'll mock that up and send it later," momentum dies. When you say "Let me show you that right now," energy builds. Decisions get made. Projects move forward.

Step 3:
After the Meeting

While generative AI has no concept of time, it's a persistent factor for us humans. At least in the case of this human, I'm much better with a topic when it's fresh in my head. To this end, I avoid back-to-back meetings now as much as possible, giving me time to work with AI right after a meeting - when I'll be the most effective. 

I recommend you process your meeting immediately. Before you check email, before you grab coffee, spend five minutes with AI turning that transcript into gold.

Custom Notes

If you've used any of the generic AI summaries of meetings, you know that they can miss the nuances of your business. You need documentation that fits your unique workflow. Time to build a Meeting Notes jig; this one will work across multiple types of meetings and projects and will be designed to turn transcripts into perfect notes.

Create another GPT/Project/Gem with custom instructions like:

Transform meeting transcripts into our standard format:

PROJECT STATUS SNAPSHOT

• Overall health: [Green/Yellow/Red]

• % complete vs. timeline

• Key wins since last meeting

• Primary blockers

DECISIONS MADE

• [Decision] | Owner: [Name] | Rationale: [Why]

• Include dissenting opinions if any

ACTION ITEMS

• [Task] | Owner | Deadline | Dependencies

• Flag any items carried over from previous meetings

RISKS & MITIGATION

• New risks identified

• Changes to existing risk status

• Mitigation strategies discussed

PARKING LOT

• Topics raised but not resolved

• Items for future discussion

NEXT MEETING PREP

• Decisions needed

• Information to gather

• People to include

Feed your transcript to this jig after the meeting. While your memory is crystal clear, you can quickly verify AI's interpretation, add context it might have missed, and ensure nothing important gets lost.

Once you've saved your processed notes, then as your AI assistant to tackle the following:

Generate tailored follow-ups: Different stakeholders need different information. Your AI crafts emails that give each person exactly what they need - detailed technical specs for developers, high-level summaries for executives, deadline reminders for project managers.

Update your systems: Whether it's Asana, Monday, or a simple spreadsheet, AI can format action items for direct import into your project management tools. Tell it what tool you're using and it will output something you can upload to almost any system.

Track commitments: Tools like Hoop (AI for SMBs Weekly subscribers get your first month free) automatically capture tasks from all your meetings, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

The compound effect is powerful. When every meeting gets this treatment, you build a searchable knowledge base of decisions, rationales, and progress. Three months later, when someone asks "Why did we choose Option B?" you have the answer in seconds, complete with context.

Step 4:
Meeting Analytics & Optimization

Now for the meta-game: using AI to analyze your meetings themselves. Every quarter, export your calendar data (or, leverage some of the emerging connections between frontier models and the Google Workspace ecosystem; Claude's new integrations seemt to be particularly great at this!) and feed it to AI with this prompt:

Analyze my meeting patterns for the last 3 months:

1. Which recurring meetings could become emails or async updates?

2. Which meetings consistently run over without clear outcomes?

3. Where am I double-booked or have back-to-back marathons?

4. Which attendees rarely contribute to discussions?

5. What's my optimal meeting time based on energy and outcomes?

6. Which meetings generate the most action items vs. talk?

Provide specific recommendations to reclaim at least 5 hours per week.

The insights will surprise you. That weekly status meeting? It generates an average of 0.8 action items. The monthly strategy session? It accounts for 40% of your breakthrough decisions. Armed with this data, you can finally kill the zombie meetings that drain your team's energy.

But generative AI doesn't just identify problems, it can also suggest solutions. Ask it to draft templates for converting certain meetings to async updates, propose new meeting structures based on successful patterns, or calculate the real dollar cost of redundant gatherings.

Make this analysis a quarterly ritual. Track how your meeting efficiency improves. Celebrate the time you've reclaimed for deep work. Share insights with your team to build a culture of purposeful collaboration.

Every optimized meeting creates a ripple effect. Better meetings mean faster decisions, clearer communication, and accelerated project completion. In a small business, that acceleration can be the difference between market leader and also-ran.

Step 5:
Get Ready for Agents

My hunch is that by year's end, AI won't just read transcripts of your meetings - it'll be sitting at the table with you. Virtual collaborators, digital employees, AI agents - whatever we end up calling them, they're about to transform from passive tools to active participants.

Right now, this capability doesn't exist in any meaningful way (trust me, I've tried with every major model). But the writing's on the wall; Google previewed this future almost a year ago, showing an AI teammate named Chip that could join meetings, contribute to discussions, and take on tasks just like any other team member.

Imagine having an AI participant that:

• Remembers every decision from every previous meeting
• Can instantly pull up relevant data during discussions
• Generates prototypes while you're still explaining the concept
• Takes on action items and actually completes them

This isn't science fiction; it's the logical next step from where we are today. The question isn't if this will happen, but how you'll use it when it does.

Start thinking now about how you'd deploy an AI team member. Would it be your technical expert, instantly implementing what you discuss? Your research analyst, fact-checking claims and finding precedents? Your creative partner, generating options faster than you can evaluate them? All of the above?

The businesses that thrive with agents won't be the ones who wait for it to arrive. They'll be the ones who've already transformed their meeting culture, established clear documentation practices, and learned to collaborate effectively with AI. Everything we've covered in this issue? It's preparation for this next phase.

When AI agents join your meetings, you'll be ready. Because you've already learned the hardest part: how to make meetings actually matter.

A Compounding Effect

Start with one project. Pick something meaningful but not mission-critical for your pilot. Set up your AI meeting ecosystem. Run your enhanced meetings for a month.

Scale this across your organization, and you're not just saving time - you're fundamentally changing how work gets done. Decisions happen faster. Projects stay on track. Teams feel energized instead of exhausted.

This isn't about replacing human connection with AI. It's about using AI to handle the mechanical parts of meetings so humans can focus on what we do best: creative problem-solving, relationship building, and strategic thinking.

Your next meeting is an opportunity. Will it be another hour of circular discussion? Or will it be a focused session that actually moves your business forward?

The tools are here. The setup takes an afternoon. Time to transform your meetings from necessary evils into competitive advantages.

✨ ✌🏻 ✨

If you have ideas for future newsletters, I'd love to hear them.