The AI-Powered Meeting Minutes Tool Is Here

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Webinar recap: Tim Adair, chief product officer, OnBoard; Matt Maxwell, senior consultant, AGB OnBoard; and Gavin Guest, vice president of product, OnBoard, explore how the platform’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered meeting minutes tool can help board professionals overcome the challenges of manually drafting meeting minutes.

In a room full of board professionals, you’re unlikely to find many who enjoy developing meeting minutes. That’s not surprising, as the process of creating, approving, distributing, and storing meeting minutes is typically time-consuming and tedious.

AGB OnBoard understands the challenges of meeting minutes. Based on insights from hundreds of conversations with AGB members, the company has released its Automated Meeting Minutes tool, which leverages your meeting’s recordings, transcript, and outline to create a first draft of your meeting minutes. “Customers and prospects alike have been asking for this type of tool for many, many years, so it’s nice to see it in action,” said Matt Maxwell, senior consultant at AGB OnBoard.

Recently, Maxwell joined OnBoard’s Tim Adair, chief product officer, and Gavin Guest, vice president of product, to explore the challenges of meeting minutes today and how the AI-powered Automated Meeting Minutes tool eases the burden. They demonstrated the tool and discussed:

The fragmented, current state of creating meeting minutes.
AGB OnBoard’s AI security and how it protects your confidential conversations.

Read on for a recap of the top takeaways from this session.

Meeting Minutes Are a Necessary Evil
Maxwell set the stage by discussing the current, chaotic state of meeting minutes. Typically, board professionals build the agenda and then draft the minutes during the meeting. Subsequently, the minutes must go through rounds of revisions and edits before being approved, distributed, and stored.

“The whole process is quite lengthy,” he explained. “It’s not a simple, linear path. There are a lot of steps—with a lot of back and forth. It’s a very, very cumbersome process to go through.”

It’s no wonder many board professionals dread the process of creating meeting minutes. “[Meeting minutes] are the bane of every board professional’s existence,” said Maxwell. “But they are a necessary evil. They are vital to governance.”

Automated Meeting Minutes Makes Life Easier
Recognizing the challenging nature of meeting minutes, AGB OnBoard developed Automated Meeting Minutes to streamline the process. “We asked ourselves, ‘How do we take this and really drive it down into something that’s tolerable and much better than having to do all this from scratch?’” said Maxwell. “[Automated Meeting Minutes] gets you 60 to 70 percent of the way there in a draft.”

Maxwell gave attendees an insider’s look at the new tool. Essentially, the AGB OnBoard meeting attendant joins the meeting, records it, and captures the transcript. Automated Meeting Minutes then takes the agenda, call recording, and transcript and automatically creates the first draft of the meeting minutes. Governance professionals can use the rich text editor to make changes.

“Is it replacing your job? No. But if it can get you 60 to 70 percent of the way there with some of the basics and streamline the process, that’s our goal,” said Maxwell.

Automated Meeting Minutes Acts as a Safety Net
A recurring piece of feedback from customers who are already using Automated Meeting Minutes is that the tool acts as a security blanket—for example, if the person responsible for meeting minutes couldn’t attend. Or maybe the person tasked with taking the minutes got distracted.

“Maybe something happened in a meeting, and I got distracted and missed something important,” explained Guest. “This acts as a nice backup and safety net for you in case any of those things happen.”

Using AI Minutes Doesn’t Disrupt Seasoned Board Members
The benefits of digital board management can’t be denied. Yet there are still seasoned board members who are resistant to making the switch and insist on using paper materials. “Some of them hug that paper and that’s totally OK,” said Maxwell.

With AGB OnBoard’s Automated Meeting Minutes tool, you can streamline meeting minutes with no disruption to board members. “Those of you who have older board members, we’re not asking you to disrupt them by any means,” said Maxwell. “With AI minutes, we can streamline back office without affecting your board members.”

With AGB OnBoard, Security Is a Top Priority
Many AI tools are available today. So, some governance professionals may wonder why they can’t just use a tool like Zoom or Otter to record and transcribe board meetings and compile meeting minutes. Adair explained that this approach isn’t as secure as we’d like to think.

“Anything that’s recorded within OnBoard is within our four walls,” he said. “If it’s recorded by a third party like Otter or Zoom or others, there may not be as many controls or restrictions around what happens with that data. There could be a link that’s shared. That’s not going to happen with OnBoard.”

Adair stressed the importance of using a tool like AGB OnBoard that makes security a top priority.

“Our goal is to make sure everything is secure, so that’s at the core of what we do and the foundation of the platform,” said Adair. “Your data is protected, and you can control it when it’s in OnBoard. That’s a big value proposition that we have as part of having Automated Meeting Minutes embedded in the OnBoard platform.”

AGB OnBoard Is Committed to Continuous Innovation
The Automated Meeting Minutes tool in AGB OnBoard simplifies and streamlines the process of creating meeting minutes. AGB OnBoard is committed to continuous innovation, and there’s plenty more in store.

“There’s a significant roadmap that’s coming up to support everything we’re doing around Automated Meeting Minutes. So, there’s a lot more to come, but we’re super excited about where it’s at,” concluded Adair.

Matt Maxwell is a senior consultant at AGB OnBoard. He has worked with the company for over a decade and has been integral in the establishment of the AGB-OnBoard partnership.