FREE GENAI PROMPT
It's yours: my go-to meeting minutes prompt
The meeting notes automatically created by Microsoft and other copilots are nowhere near good enough to circulate. Here's what I use instead.
Hi, I'm Carrie - a future of work and collaboration specialist with a PhD in meetings 😵💫.
In the future, we will have custom prompts for each type of meeting. They will be built into copilots and there will be no cutting and pasting! And in fact, I do use custom meeting prompts all the time - but as a general go-to prompt that works pretty well for creating notes from almost any regular meeting type, here is the prompt I use.
Shout out to Alex at AI Tinkerers Club for developing my thinking and and Dan Coleby from Advania for helping navigating the Microsoft labyrinth!
How to use this prompt
- You'll need a meeting transcript and a copilot that will handle a document (e.g. Microsoft Copilot or the paid version of ChatGPT). If you have a Microsoft365 licence, the quickest way is go to copilot.microsoft.com and log in.
- Cut and paste the prompt into the copilot and upload the meeting transcript in PDF format.
- See how the results look - use one or two or the refining prompts if you need to.
- Copy and paste the results back out and into a document or group chat.
- Outputs may vary and you will always get a better result from a paid service. That said, I get a very similar quality of output via my paid subscription to ChatGPT compared with Copilot for Web which comes with my Microsoft 365 licence.
*Consider privacy! Meeting transcripts are often confidential. ChatGPT may not secure enough for internal / confidential meeting notes.
**Don't forget - if you're a new subscriber, you'll now receive my weekly FrictionFree newsletter each Thursday, with more concepts like this unpacked into actionable ideas you can use today. You can unsubscribe from this any time.
The prompt
Start copy/paste 👇
-----
Please process the following meeting transcript and create detailed notes that include the following sections:
1. Meeting purpose: Summarise the overall purpose of the meeting.
2. Important discussion points raised in this meeting: For each topic discussed, include the following, including who raised it and the notes associated with each topic in a table, one table per topic. Include these items as rows:
* Discussion points: Capture all the discussion points made on this topic
* Ideas: Make a list of all new ideas and suggestions brought up during the meeting on this topic.
* Concerns: Make a list of concerns raised by the participants about this topic
* Constraints: Make a list of constraints or limitations shared on this topic .
* Other points of note: Make a list of anything else that was raised in relation to this topic.
3. Decisions made in this meeting: Provide a full, detailed account of all decisions reached during the meeting.
4. Actions from this meeting: List all actions decided in the meeting in a table including these items shown as rows:
* Task: What needs to be done.
* Who: Who is responsible for completing the task.
* Deadline: When the task should be completed.
5. Documents mentioned: List any documents referenced during the meeting and describe their relevance.
6. Question remaining: Capture any questions that were raised which need further clarification or more information.
7. Bonus recommendations (suggested by AI): Can you suggest additional recommendations that weren't discussed in the meeting, which will fill in any gaps in our thinking and then put them in a table as follows:
* Risks: flag any risks to our discussion or planning that you think we may not have thought of
* Questions: highlight any questions you think we might need to answer which were not surfaced in the meeting
* Suggestions: make detailed suggestions about how we might implement what was discussed in this meeting, taking us beyond what was discussed in the meeting.
* Communications: make additional recommendations about who we need to communicate the outcomes of this meeting to and how, beyond the actions already listed.
Please ensure that the notes are well-organised, with each section clearly labeled, and provide as much detail as possible for each point (don't summarise). Please use UK English spelling only. If you are unsure of an acronym or meaning of a word, please ask me before creating the meeting notes.
----
Stop copy/paste 👆
Possible refining prompts
A couple of follow up prompts I sometimes use👇
-----
Please provide more specific detail, explaining each discussion point in full.
---
Please repeat this but in section 7, please provide brand new risks, questions, suggestions and communication recommendations that were not mentioned in the meeting and which you think we might have missed.
Let me know how you get on
I'm improving this prompt all the time - and I'd love to know how you get on.
You can drop me a line here.
