Turning meeting notes into actions.

Whoever ends up “doing the notes” after a meeting, whether a project manager, team lead, executive assistant or owner, can hand the first draft to AI, provided the output is an action table rather than a summary. Your goal here is a routine that turns rough notes or a transcript into a table you can send within a day, with every owner and date traced to something actually said. Allow 25 minutes and bring the notes from a recent meeting.

Why summaries are the wrong output

Most AI note tools produce a summary: tidy paragraphs about what was discussed. Summaries are pleasant to read and easy to ignore. What a meeting actually produces is a short list of commitments: who will do what, by when. If that list is wrong or vague, the meeting was wasted.

AI is good at finding commitments in messy text. It is also prone to finishing them off: turning “someone should chase the electrician” into “Sam to chase the electrician by Friday”. The method below stops that.

The action table

Below the table, ask for two short lists: decisions made and open questions. Keeping them separate stops decisions disappearing into the action list.

Notes or transcript: which works better

Both work, with different failure modes. A transcript captures everything, so the assistant can quote exact words, but it is long, full of half-sentences and more likely to contain sensitive asides. Typed notes are shorter and already filtered by someone who understood the meeting, but they miss whatever the note-taker did not write down. A practical rule: for meetings with clients or contractors where commitments carry cost, use a transcript and keep the source column strict; for internal catch-ups, typed notes are enough. Either way, the person who ran the meeting checks the table.

Exercise: build an action table from real notes

1. Take notes from a recent meeting. Typed notes or a transcript both work. Remove any discussion of individuals’ health, performance or personal circumstances.
2. Run the action table prompt. Use the worked example as a pattern, including the rules about UNCLEAR.
3. Check each row against its source. Read the quoted line. Does it support the action, the owner and the date? Fix or delete rows that overreach.
4. Resolve the UNCLEARs. Message the likely owner and ask, rather than deciding for them.
5. Send within 24 hours. Email the table to attendees and ask them to reply with corrections by a set time.
6. Load it into your system. Put confirmed actions into your project or task tool, and open the next meeting by reviewing them.

Worked example: a Queenstown fit-out site meeting

Illustrative example: a project manager runs a fortnightly site meeting for a restaurant fit-out in Queenstown with the builder, the electrician and the client’s representative. Her typed notes:

site mtg 14 oct. present: Aroha (PM), Dave (builder), Mere (sparky), Tom (client)
- kitchen extraction duct clash w beam. Dave to get engineer to look, asap
- Tom wants to change pendant lights in dining, will send new spec
- switchboard upgrade: lines company booking needed. someone to chase
- painting can't start til gib stopping signed off. Dave says next thurs maybe
- agreed: opening date stays 28 Nov
- Mere: needs final kitchen layout before she can price extra circuits

The prompt:

From the meeting notes below, produce:
1. A table: Action | Owner | Due | Source (quote the exact line).
   Include only actions someone agreed to or was assigned in the notes.
   Use a name only if the notes say who. Otherwise write UNCLEAR.
   Use a date only if the notes state one. Otherwise write UNCLEAR. Do not convert
   words like "asap" or "maybe" into dates.
2. Decisions made (bullet list).
3. Open questions (bullet list).
Do not add anything that is not in the notes.

[paste notes]

Example output (illustrative and abridged):

Action                                  | Owner   | Due     | Source
Get engineer to review duct/beam clash  | Dave    | UNCLEAR | "Dave to get engineer to look, asap"
Send new pendant light spec             | Tom     | UNCLEAR | "will send new spec"
Book switchboard upgrade w/ lines co.   | UNCLEAR | UNCLEAR | "someone to chase"
Provide final kitchen layout to Mere    | UNCLEAR | UNCLEAR | "needs final kitchen layout"

Decisions made
- Opening date stays 28 November.

Open questions
- When will gib stopping be signed off? ("next thurs maybe")

Three of four rows have gaps. That is the point: before AI, these would have been silently assumed. Aroha resolves them by message in ten minutes and sends the table that afternoon.

Where AI meeting notes go wrong

• Invented owners and dates. The most common error, and the reason for the UNCLEAR rule and source column.
• Misheard names. Transcription tools often mangle names, especially te reo Māori names and place names. Check every name against the attendee list.
• Sensitive discussion captured. Transcripts keep everything, including the five minutes about a staff member’s health. Pause recording, or remove that section before processing.
• Recording without telling people. A recording or transcript collects personal information. Under information privacy principle 3 of the Privacy Act 2020, take reasonable steps so attendees know; saying so at the start is the minimum.
• Automating before checking. Pushing AI-extracted actions straight into a project tool spreads errors. Check first; automate later, once the error rate is known.

Built-in tools can do the capture for you. Microsoft lists Copilot in Teams on its paid Copilot licences (Microsoft), and Google lists Gemini in Meet for summaries and note-taking (Google), both as at 19 October 2026. Our guides to AI and Microsoft Teams and AI and Asana cover the set-up, and meeting actions into project systems shows how firms connect this to their project tools once the manual routine is reliable. If you want that step automated with a review gate, see our AI workflow automation service. For the other end of the meeting, revisit using AI for meeting preparation.

Check your action table

• Every action starts with a verb and has a source quote.
• Owners and dates appear only where the notes state them; the rest say UNCLEAR.
• Decisions and open questions are listed separately.
• I resolved each UNCLEAR by asking the person, not by guessing.
• Attendees received the table within 24 hours with a deadline for corrections.
• Attendees knew in advance if the meeting was recorded or transcribed.

Next lesson: Drafting emails with human review covers the follow-up email that sends your action table and everything else you write with AI.

Written by the Levy Street team in Wellington. Last updated 19 October 2026.