A FTSE250 Company Secretary writes...
We have recently engaged with Board Intelligence on their Minute Writer tool (advertised as a purpose-built AI tool that formats meeting transcripts / notes into minutes). We consider the cost too high to implement at the current time (£25k per annum for 2 users), but I’d be interested to know whether anyone has experience / feedback of using this or other AI tools to assist with minute writing that (a) genuinely save time; and (b) are secure and do not share confidential information. Thank you.
I really don’t think AI can write minutes where there is conjecture and discussion and that comes to a rounded decision. That can only come through experience and understanding the nuances of what is being said and the conclusions reached. AI would capture comments that are not to be recorded and therefore you would find that meetings becoming not open debate for fear of discussion being captured and held against individuals.
For the reasons given by other respondents to the question, I will not be using AI to write minutes for board meetings (or help me write them). It doesn’t get nuance, it’s not secure and there’s no single source of truth.
Provided you’re confident about it’s security, then you could record meetings to help with the production of minutes on the basis that the recordings are permanently deleted
For the time being I will continue to use the only AI I trust (i.e. me – the Absolute Idiot) 🙂
I am interested to hear about how AI may help me write mins but I dont currently know of or use a tool.
We are considering using the BoardIntel solution for subsidiary boards and below PLC committees but there are still a lot of things that don’t work for me – we are against recording/transcribing meetings and for PLC we don’t ‘type’ minutes but hand write them old school. It could be a time saver to create the skeleton minutes but too expensive if we only used it for that.
There are some Teams in-built solutions that could work just as well (or bad) without the cost!
I would not recommend using AI- they would record every word verbatim – and could could a security issue with sensitive data. Deletion is probably impossible as information on computers/in the cloud can be recovered.
I’d agree with both the previous two comments. Security issues need consideration. Have trialled it once on a zoom held meeting. It did a reasonable job of picking the key points and summarising. But still not yet a replacement for human note taking and appreciation of nuances. No doubt it will improve and worth considering again in the future but not right now.
I will not be using AI to write my minutes. One source of truth is required. Once minutes are approved by the board/committee I destroy any drafting notes/drafts.
A company that demo’d the AI tool could not answer my question about deleting transcripts / drafts.
I haven’t looked at Board intelligence but have considered a much cheaper solution, Govrn. https://govrn.com/
The issue, per our head of IT, is that it does not comply with the following:
• ISO 27001
• SOC 2 – this is the gold standard for a cloud-based solution
giving rise to security issues.
We trialled it and it does 80% of the work – I purposefully threw some red herrings in the test meeting by having 3 minutes of nonsensical discourse, and it did not deal with it well, whereas a human would have spotted this. So definitely a time saver, but you need to be comfortable with the security and be prepared to spend time finishing the job.
Interested to read the answers! We tried Microsoft copilot (the premium version) for our last board meeting because it is within our secure M365 environment. It was useful in the meeting (eg where I had to step out for a moment and I was able to ask it to summarise the last 5 mins discussion. It was also fine at a summary of the meeting, and it was useful to have the transcript to refer to (which auto deletes after a few months) but it was completely useless at creating minutes off the back of it. I need to work with our tech team to see if I can train it, but I’m keen to explore other solutions if I can get comfortable with security and they’re affordable. I certainly couldn’t justify anything like that cost!