Turn meetings into action items with AI

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. Today, we’re going deep on all things AI meeting assistants. These tools can turn meetings into action items and transform conversations into structured data — all without having to take a single note. Read on to learn more about the top AI meeting assistants and how to take your meetings to the next level.

Today’s Topics

• How AI meeting assistants can save you time

• Convert meeting transcripts into follow-up emails

• Workflow automation news

• Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 6 minutes

How AI meeting assistants can save you time

One of the highest utility use cases we’ve experienced with generative AI in the workplace is meeting transcription. Tools in this domain seriously deliver value. Onboarding one for yourself or your team will markedly improve your meeting quality and output. It will also save time. Gone are the days of needing a dedicated notetaker or finding out important action items have fallen through the cracks. With today’s AI transcription tools, you can get highly accurate, full readouts of meetings without taking a single note and automate this data across your suite of communication and data tools.

If there’s one thing you leave with from reading this week’s edition, it’s that these tools actually work, and work well. If there’s a second thing you leave with, it’s that the majority of these tools have all converged on doing the same things and doing them well.

What are some of the top tools in the market?

• Fireflies

• Otter

• Circleback

• tl;dv

• Granola

We’re not going to push one tool over another, as we haven’t tried them all (full disclosure: we use Fireflies), but it’s helpful to know what these tools can do and what to look for when evaluating one for your business.

What can these tools do?

• Transcribe, summarize, and analyze voice conversations from your video or audio meetings.

• Transform transcriptions into organized notes, follow-ups, and searchable content repositories.

• Send meeting data to other tools and platforms, like your CRM, chat client, project management tools, and more.

• Export content in various formats: PDF, structured docs, video recording, unabridged transcript, and more.

Our recommendation is to uncover your highest priority requirements for meeting automation, review these tools’ offerings, and onboard one or two to test. For instance, if you want video recordings, Fireflies is great; if you want structured notes documents, Granola is wonderful.

Convert meeting transcripts into follow-up emails

One of our favorite workflows with an AI meeting assistant tool is to hook it up to Zapier and turn your meeting notes into further automated processes. For example, with Fireflies, Zapier, OpenAI, and Gmail, you can take a sales meeting recording and automatically generate a follow-up email draft to a prospect.

Steps to follow:

• Create a Zap in Zapier with Fireflies “New Meeting” event as the trigger

• Set the next action to a ChatGPT “Conversation”

• Add this prompt to your ChatGPT step: “Convert the below meeting summary into a follow-up email to {insert attendee from step 1}. {insert meeting summary from step 1}. Just output the email body and nothing else.”

• Add a third step to create an email draft, either via Outlook or Gmail

• Make the subject of the email: “Follow-up: {insert meeting name}”

• Insert the output from the ChatGPT step as the body of the email

• Set the recipient as the attendee from the Fireflies meeting

And that’s it! Set the Zap live and a few minutes after your next meeting, you should have a follow-up email in your drafts folder. This is a great workflow for any client or customer-facing team.

Workflow automation news

• OpenAI introduces Structured Outputs in the API This is a new feature designed to ensure model-generated outputs will exactly match JSON Schemas provided by developers, further enhancing one of the core AI use cases of generating structured data from unstructured inputs.

• What if AI had a corporate culture? How AI software engineering agents perform differently based on structuring interactions as big tech org charts like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and more. Fascinating read!

• How I Use "AI" Nicholas Carlini provides specific instances where AI models, particularly large language models like GPT-4, have helped solve complex problems and enhance productivity in both work and life.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether it’s specific automations for your business, AI and no code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

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