The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

Impres­sive, but…

While I see the poten­tial in no longer hav­ing to take meet­ing notes man­u­al­ly, I have some­times been left with a bad after­taste when read­ing Copi­lot’s sum­ma­ry of my meet­ing. Hav­ing AI men­tion that ​“in the begin­ning, Anna and David talked about how sum­mer is almost here and how Anna will be going on an ear­ly vaca­tion to…” makes me blush a little.

I’m still not com­plete­ly com­fort­able with hav­ing an AI lis­ten and pick up on every­thing I say in a meet­ing — even the small talk. I know that Microsoft and oth­ers take data secu­ri­ty seri­ous­ly. Still, I want more con­trol over what infor­ma­tion from me is being sent out into the ether and poten­tial­ly read by someone.

That being said, I do appre­ci­ate the sum­maries and bul­let-point­ed information!

A bit more man­u­al, but much more control

Copi­lot in OneNote can be a gold­en mid­dle ground! For those of you who usu­al­ly take meet­ing notes in OneNote (an excel­lent place for them, espe­cial­ly for those work­ing on the Microsoft 365 plat­form), you can ask Copi­lot at the end of the meet­ing to sum­ma­rize what was dis­cussed. Prompt ​“Sum­ma­rize these meet­ing notes, please” and you’ll get a quick summary.

What are your next steps? Ask Copi­lot with a prompt like ​“What are my next steps from this meet­ing?”. You prob­a­bly already know, but get­ting a sec­ond opin­ion may result in the AI iden­ti­fy­ing some­thing that needs to be done that you had­n’t thought of.

Has your boss asked you to report on how the meet­ing went after­ward? Ask Copi­lot to write a draft email for you by prompt­ing, ​“I’d like to report back to my boss about what we dis­cussed in the meet­ing. Could you please write an email to my boss where I men­tion the essen­tial points? Use a semi-for­mal tone.” or some­thing similar!

Help­ful, in my opinion!

Do this

If you haven’t tried it yet, ask for Copi­lot’s help in OneNote after your next meeting.

1. Dur­ing the meet­ing, take free-form notes on a sep­a­rate page in OneNote as usu­al. I bet you can afford to wor­ry less about tak­ing struc­tured notes than usu­al. The AI seems to catch on any­way. The more you write, the more data the AI has to work with, and the more use­ful it will be.
   
2. After the meet­ing, ask Copi­lot for a sum­ma­ry — prefer­ably in bul­let-point form for readability.
   
3. Also ask for a list of next steps. When I ask for them to be for­mat­ted so that they can eas­i­ly be copied and past­ed into Microsoft To-Do, Copi­lot does a pret­ty good job.
   
4. While you’re at it, try ask­ing or request­ing some­thing else from Copi­lot. It’s through exper­i­men­ta­tion that you learn what’s pos­si­ble. Can the AI write an email about the meet­ing? Can it find some­thing you didn’t dis­cuss in the meet­ing but should have?

You save time and energy

If you let Copi­lot sum­ma­rize meet­ing notes in OneNote, you have con­trol over what infor­ma­tion you share and get some help ana­lyz­ing the meet­ing after­ward. If the AI finds a next step you had­n’t thought of, you’ll get more out of the meet­ing, which means you’ve used your time bet­ter. If the AI also writes most of the fol­low-up email after­ward, you’ll save both time and ener­gy that you can use for oth­er impor­tant tasks.

What about you?

Have you used Copi­lot in OneNote for some­thing oth­er than this? Tell me about it in an email. Few things excite me as much right now as hear­ing about smart and use­ful appli­ca­tions of AI.

(And tell me, what do you want to learn about AI in prac­tice?)