Automate Meeting Minutes

The task everyone puts off

Nobody likes writing meeting minutes. It’s time-consuming, tedious, and often gets pushed to the last minute, when you’ve already forgotten half of what was said. The result is predictable: incomplete documents sent too late that no one reads. With ChatGPT, you can generate professional minutes from your raw notes in just a few minutes. It’s a recurring task with a clear output and massive time savings—the ideal use case.

The raw notes method

Contrary to what you might think, you don’t need to take neat, structured notes during the meeting. Raw notes are enough, and that’s actually an advantage: they capture essential information without the formatting that slows you down. Write as you think: list the names of speakers, decisions made (even tentative ones), action items with owners, dates and deadlines mentioned, disagreements or points of tension, and any figures discussed. Format doesn’t matter; ChatGPT handles the structure.

One caveat: the tool can’t invent what you didn’t note. Notes reduced to “we talked about Project X” will never produce usable minutes, no matter how good your prompt is.

The minutes prompt

Here are my raw notes from the [type] meeting on [date].
Attendees: [list]
Duration: [duration]

Notes:
[Paste your raw notes]

Generate professional meeting minutes with:

1. **Executive Summary** (3 lines max)
2. **Decisions Made** (numbered)
3. **Action Items** (format: [Owner] - [Action] - [Deadline])
4. **Open Issues** (unresolved items to revisit)
5. **Next Meeting** (date, planned topics)

Tone: professional, factual. No vague phrasing.
Use bullet points. Maximum 1 page.

Adapt the prompt to the meeting type and audience

You can specialize this template by adding a specific instruction. For an executive committee, add: “Highlight strategic decisions and KPIs mentioned. Executive format: maximum 10-line summary, followed by decisions and actions.” The goal is to fit everything on one screen.

For a client meeting, the instruction becomes: “These minutes will be sent to the client. Use a professional and warm tone. Highlight mutual commitments. Do not mention internal discussions.” That last sentence isn’t cosmetic—it prevents internal reservations expressed among colleagues from ending up in an external document.

A retrospective requires a different structure: “Organize into three sections: What Went Well, What Could Be Improved, and Improvement Actions with Owners.” And for a brainstorming session, where the volume of ideas makes summarization difficult: “Group ideas by theme. For each theme, list the proposed ideas and identify the most promising ones based on [criteria].”

Start from an automatic transcription

If your company uses a meeting transcription tool—Teams, Zoom, Otter—you can paste the transcript directly into ChatGPT. The prompt changes slightly, since the primary task is filtering out noise.

Here is the transcript of our [type] meeting on [date].
Filter out small talk and digressions.
Extract only decisions, action items, and key points.

[Paste transcript]

Use the same minutes format as usual.

Current models handle long transcripts. On paid plans, you can also import a meeting audio recording directly and request a summary of decisions, open questions, and next steps. However, the help center warns that transcriptions may contain errors and speaker identification isn’t always reliable: verify key points against the original, and only record meetings with participant consent.

On Mac, there’s a third option: the Meetings plugin, currently in beta in the ChatGPT desktop app for macOS on Pro and Business plans. It takes notes during an online call or in-person conversation without joining the meeting as a bot, then saves a private page by default in ChatGPT Space with a summary and suggested action items; the audio is deleted once the notes are ready. Notify all participants and obtain their consent before starting note-taking: the app’s reminder is for you only and doesn’t alert them.

From meeting to sent email

The complete cycle flows without interruption: you prepare the agenda before the meeting (Lesson 6), take raw notes or start transcription during it, paste everything into ChatGPT right afterward with the prompt above, spend two minutes reviewing to verify names, dates, and decisions, then copy the result into an email with a clear subject line. Count on less than five minutes after the meeting ends: your colleagues will receive the minutes before they’re even back at their desks.

Two caution points bear repeating because they’re costly. First, review carefully: ChatGPT can confuse two participants or swap two dates, and a factual error in minutes can damage your credibility long-term. Second, timing matters: every hour you wait costs you nuances your notes didn’t capture. Do it immediately, and if you’re satisfied with the result, save the prompt in a project for next time.

Your turn

One-pass minutes. At your next meeting, take raw notes without formatting. Right afterward, run the minutes prompt from this lesson, review to verify names, dates, and commitments, then send it. Note the corrections you had to make: those are what will improve your template.

Official sources: Uploading files and audio to ChatGPT · The Meetings plugin in ChatGPT (OpenAI Help Center) · Prompting (ChatGPT documentation)

Key takeaways

• Raw notes are enough: ChatGPT handles the structure
• Use a structured template: summary, decisions, actions, open issues, next meeting
• Adapt the prompt to the meeting type and audience
• Send minutes right after the meeting, while everything is fresh
• Combine preparation (Lesson 6) and minutes for a complete meeting workflow