Meetings that produce decisions, not minutes

The situation

A transformation program ran over forty recurring meetings a week. Minutes were inconsistent, actions were lost and decisions were re-opened because nobody could find where they had been made. The program director wanted an AI note-taker in every room.

What changed

Instead, the meetings were triaged first. A third were cancelled or merged. For those that remained, an assistant was briefed to produce one output only: decisions, actions with owners and dates, and open questions. Not a transcript, not a summary. A person confirms each decision in the room before it enters the decision log. Sensitive meetings, including anything involving personnel or regulators, were excluded from AI capture by policy.

The result

The decision log became the single most used document on the program. Re-opened decisions dropped sharply because every decision had a date, an owner and the context that produced it. The program director later said the biggest win was the meeting cull, which the AI discussion had forced.

What it teaches

• Decide what an assistant must not capture before you decide what it may.
• The output format is the governance. Design it on purpose.
• AI projects are often a chance to fix the process underneath.

A composite drawn from our engagement work and published practice. Details are generalized and no client is identified.