Better team meetings with AI

Meetings are essential to teamwork, yet they're often the source of frustration, wasted time, and missed opportunities. AI presents an opportunity to reimagine how teams come together, collaborate, and make decisions in meetings.

By thoughtfully integrating AI into our meeting workflows, we can shift from information-heavy status sessions to more productive, informed conversations that drive better decisions.

Intelligent Pre-Meeting Preparation

AI excels at homework and preparation tasks that traditionally burden meeting participants. Before teams gather, AI can:

Synthesize relevant background materials and pre-reading
Analyze previous meeting notes and action items
Prepare briefing documents tailored to each participant's role

Examples:

Product Status Update: AI reviews last week's meeting notes, the plan, and the commits and conversations in the intervening weeks, and prepares a summary of status.
Client Presentation Prep: AI researches the client's recent news, financial performance, and industry challenges, then creates talking points and potential objections with suggested responses for each sales team member.

This preparation ensures everyone arrives informed and ready to contribute meaningfully, rather than spending meeting time getting up to speed.

Eliminating Status Update Theater

Too many meetings exist simply to communicate status updates, progress reports, and routine information sharing. AI can handle much of this communication asynchronously, freeing up meeting time for genuine collaboration.

Examples:

Weekly Standups: Instead of spending 30 minutes having each person report their progress, AI automatically pulls updates from project management tools, code repositories, and calendars, then generates a visual dashboard highlighting blockers, achievements, and upcoming deadlines.
Project Status Communications: AI monitors Slack, email, and project tools to automatically generate stakeholder updates, escalate issues that need attention, and schedule check-ins only when human intervention is actually needed.

When teams use AI to share status updates, track project progress, and communicate routine information outside of meetings, they can reserve their face-to-face time for activities that truly require human interaction: creative brainstorming, complex problem-solving, strategic planning, and relationship building.

From Information Asymmetry to Shared Intelligence

During the meeting, AI can address information asymmetry by providing rapid fact checks, research, analysis, and summarization as discussions unfold. Instead of taking action items to look up data that is key to a strategic question and instead of relying on hearsay or the loudest person's assertions, teams can access relevant information instantly, keeping the conversation flowing and ensuring everyone operates from the same foundation of knowledge.

Examples:

Market Size Discussions: When someone mentions "the growing cybersecurity market," AI instantly provides current market size, growth rate and key segments, allowing the team to make data-driven decisions without derailing the conversation.
Competitive Analysis: During a product feature debate, AI quickly pulls up competitor feature comparisons from your internal documents and recent customer reviews (from the web), giving everyone the same baseline information to evaluate strategic options.

This during-the-meeting information depth and rigor can reduce one of the greatest risks of meetings: the tradeoff between the need to make progress while everyone is gathered and the need to have sufficient and accurate data to inform the discussion.

Better Meeting Notes

Taking good meeting notes is essential to not lose key points, questions, context, decisions, and action items. It is hard to do this well while also participating fully in the discussion. AI can free up all to participate while it takes a full transcript and provides the summary notes.

Examples:

Decision Tracking: AI identifies when the team decides to "pivot the marketing strategy" and automatically creates action items with owners, deadlines, and success metrics, while flagging that the budget implications weren't fully discussed.
Conflict Resolution: During a heated debate about resource allocation, AI notes that one person advocated for hiring developers while another pushed for marketing spend, and flags this as an unresolved tension requiring follow-up discussion
Action Items: AI tracks when team members make commitments or are assigned actions and automatically creates action items and follow-up check-ins, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

The person who takes meeting notes has traditionally held significant power in that they shape the narrative, highlight certain decisions, and influence follow-up actions. AI can democratize this process by taking a full transcript and by linking summary points to that transcript.

AI as Meeting Contributor vs. Secretary

The most powerful applications of AI in team meetings go beyond having a digital secretary. Instead of just taking notes and scheduling follow-ups, AI can participate as a collaborative team meeting contributor:

Suggesting relevant frameworks or methodologies
Offering alternative perspectives
Identifying potential blind spots in team thinking
Simulating the perspectives of different stakeholders

Examples:

Strategic Planning: When the team focuses on expanding to new markets, AI suggests considering the "Jobs to Be Done" framework and points out they haven't discussed customer acquisition costs in emerging markets or regulatory barriers.
Product Development: During feature prioritization, AI plays devil's advocate by highlighting that the proposed AI chatbot feature might cannibalize their premium support tier revenue, forcing the team to think through business model implications.
Crisis Response: When discussing a PR crisis, AI suggests the team consider second and third-order effects they haven't mentioned, such as impact on employee morale and partner relationships, while recommending crisis communication frameworks from similar industry situations.
Facilitated Decision-Making: AI facilitates team decisions by anonymously collecting input from all members, identifying common themes and outlier perspectives, and presenting options without revealing who suggested what, reducing hierarchy bias and groupthink.

Today, this kind of help from AI can be unlocked by asking the AI questions like "What are we missing in this strategic plan so far?" or "Play devil's advocate?" or "What else should we consider in dealing with this PR crisis?" or "What would you add to the discussion so far?"

Better Meetings

The goal isn't to replace human meetings with AI, but to eliminate the mundane aspects that prevent teams from reaching their full collaborative potential. When AI handles information gathering, note-taking, aspects of preparation, and routine communication, human participants can focus thinking, discussion, strategy, decisions, and relationship.

While AI can augment each team member's work individually, the greatest value comes from AI that empowers the whole team together.

Next Steps

Try one use case or example above for your next meeting.
Sign up for Stravu's Beta to collaborate together with your team members and AI