How to automatically turn client meetings into instant actions

If you're leading a team or running a service-based business, you know meetings are a necessary evil for building relationships and keeping things moving forward.

Truthfully, the worst part about having a meeting is not the meeting itself, but having to summarize it, delegate tasks, send follow-ups, and somehow keep everyone aligned afterward.

In this episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane and Micah share how AI meeting tools are doing the heavy lifting—turning conversations into clear summaries, action items, and providing the key details you need to quickly draft follow-up emails. No more scrambling through notes or asking, “Who was supposed to do that again?” 

Here’s what you’ll take away:

• How to use AI to instantly generate to-dos and follow-ups (without lifting a finger)
• Why clear internal processes are the real secret to getting value from these tools
• Reduce manual tasks and improve accountability
• How AI can double as your meeting assistant and your content repurposing engine

If your calendar is packed with calls but your team’s still chasing clarity after every one, this episode is for you.

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. There has been a decision that we made a couple years ago that has completely changed and benefited us the way that we manage everything. And it's having an AI meeting recorder.

0:00:31 - (Micah): My God. I wasn't exactly sure where you were going with this but yes, it was, I don't know one of the main biggest things we've ever had in this business.

0:00:43 - (Alane): Like revolutionary, completely worth like every penny that we pay for our team to have access to this and for ourselves. We use this one piece in multip use cases within our organization for automation.

0:01:00 - (Micah): It is safe to say I use it in every meeting and I use it every day and I use it for every meeting prep that I need to look at or get into. And it's to the point where it's not necessarily a handicap, but it is such a useful tool.

0:01:17 - (Alane): It is and I remember a year ago and we were already had already been using, we use grain internally, we'd already been using it for a while and I remember a year ago doing an AI presentation and having this as a big piece of hey, you know have having this tool as a part of your tech stack is extremely valuable and so many people were just so adverse to using it because well, I don't want you know, this listening into our meeting and getting information and had a bunch of excuses and that's okay, you have your right to feel that way. But I can't imagine having to go back to manual translating information to team members to execute to remembering what we talked about and making sure that I get everything correct being present on the call.

0:02:11 - (Micah): Yeah, I mean I can, I can list, you know, since we're, we're right at the beginning of this topic, I can listen easily three or more things that are just mind blowing right off the top one, we record a call. It summarizes everything. So if I have a consult with somebody within five minutes of completing that call, I have an email out to them with the next steps with the chapters of the call. You know the call broken down into chapters with a complete summary with a link to the recording everything that they need for them to recap what the call is. Because how many times do you get on a call with a potential vendor they dump a bunch of information at you and then you're like God, if I could just do that call all over again or listen to that again.

0:02:59 - (Micah): And that's what this provides. Number two, I can go back to a call and ask it questions. So I'm like, what did I say about this? What did the client say about this? What were the next steps? Whatever it was, I can ask questions about it because it's all transcribed. And then number three, we can grab clips out of that and send it to the team so they don't have to watch the entire meeting. They can just watch the one or two minutes that are most important for them to understand about the meeting to complete something.

0:03:32 - (Micah): On a development side.

0:03:33 - (Alane): Yeah. And I mean, we could continue listing the ways that we use these too, and hopefully it inspires somebody listening. But we use the meeting transcript as part of our automation for proposal generation. So it's part of our sales process. And we have an episode on that that we can link in the show notes. But really getting to the core of the pain points that your client has and how you solve them, and it's all done within two minutes in the proposal generation.

0:04:01 - (Alane): Another place we use it is in the kickoff deck creation. What do we need to achieve it builds it from a template that we've assigned it, and it does an amazing job. And it's all from the meeting, not notes. And you have recorded testimonials. How hard is it to remember to get testimonials from your clients? And you have it exactly verbatim what they said, and you can get approval for it. It's not that we're just gonna take these and run, but that, hey, I really liked what you said there. Could I use that as a testimonial? And it's their words.

0:04:32 - (Micah): Yeah. And you don't. Yeah, you just clip it out. We've done that multiple times because, of course, everybody raves when they get on the call with us. So then we just clip everything out.

0:04:41 - (Alane): Exactly. We have tons of raving.

0:04:44 - (Micah): Yeah. All right. So I mean, this. This kind of piggybacks into something that I get asked all the time because companies are starting to use these. Copilot has this functionality built into it. If you're on a Microsoft Suite, there's all these tools and all these teams that are. This is becoming more regular. So if you're not using it, definitely look into it, because it is worth it 100%. There's even free tools out there that can do this.

0:05:16 - (Micah): But now we're entering the next level of this. And the question that I get asked all the time, and I think you're hearing this A lot too. Alane is, hey, we're recording our meetings, but we're not able to figure out how to create action items from these meetings.

0:05:31 - (Alane): Yeah, I do get that. And you know, there's so many processes that are in place at an organization to try to glean that information that AI and some automation could already create that from having that as an integrated tool where it goes in and puts the action items into ClickUp.

0:05:50 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. So essentially you have a meeting, you have your AI call recorder, you have all the benefits from that. It auto transcribes it, it sends a webhook to an automation process as soon as the transcription is complete and ready. And then from that you have the automation leveraging another AI that goes through the transcript, identifies action items, and then syncs up with your project management tool to create and assign and date and prioritize the action items discussed in the meeting.

0:06:25 - (Alane): Yeah. So Micah, one thing that I want to say on this is that whatever tool you decide to use for this, for meeting a meeting recorder, you need to have standardization in your company in order to automate it with a tool like your project management system or your CRM. You don't have every person in your organization working from different CRMs. You don't have one using HubSpot and one using Pipedrive. If you are, let's chat.

0:06:53 - (Micah): Maybe they do. But if you do, then please listen to our other episodes on standardization.

0:06:59 - (Alane): Yeah. So the first step is deciding on the tool that you're going to use. There's. There's so many out there. Are there better ones? Sure than others. But if you have one, it's going to be able to record your transcript, create action items, that's what you're looking for, and then pay for it for your team that's client facing, whether that would be your salespeople and your account managers, whatever you call them, but they're client facing, having client facing discussions.

0:07:29 - (Alane): Because if you don't give them those tools, then they're going to have to do that work manually and then you're not getting the benefits.

0:07:36 - (Micah): I mean, Alane, I know you're thinking it from a client facing point of view, but I think there's an argument to be made for internal meetings too, especially for larger organizations, because there's plenty of teams that need to have very important meetings that have action Items, that have VAs, that have assistance, that are doing all of this work by hand, taking notes, building, you know, post meeting briefs, creating action items. And to be honest, that just isn't as good not even from a speed perspective, but just from a game of telephone perspective. It's so much harder. But internal meetings, creating action items, I would say, is definitely something to consider as your team grows.

0:08:24 - (Alane): Yeah, I think that's valid, Micah. And I think, you know, from somebody going, well, gosh, then do I need to pay for this software for every single team member? You know, I think, I think I could argue that, no, you don't need it for every team member, but should a manager then have it? Who's leading these calls that an organization, you know, you would want to be able to take out action items. Just trying to, you know, frame it so that, no, you don't have to pay it for every single person on your team. You just need one person leading the meeting to have the access to it.

0:08:56 - (Micah): Yeah, I would say, too. And I don't want to jump around too much, but tool choice for standardization is super important. So when Otter first came out, I was completely amazed. I installed it on my phone. It was awesome. I remember working on the lake house, I wanted to, like, measure a bunch of stuff so that I. I can't remember. We were doing something in the bathroom and I needed to measure stuff and there was nobody else there and I didn't have any other free hands. So I turned Otter on, on my phone and said the measurements out loud and it transcribed it into text that I could then use to go back as if it was taking.

0:09:35 - (Micah): It was taking notes. Obviously not a business case, but, like, Otter was amazing. Now Otter's at the bottom of my list. There's. So I would say my personal top three. I don't know if you have other favorites, Alane, but my personal top three for look, top three for looking into is we use grain, and we've been using grain for years. It's amazing. I don't know. I don't have anything really bad to say about it other than I. I wish it was more flexible for integrations.

0:10:03 - (Alane): That would be my con.

0:10:05 - (Micah): Yeah, Fireflies. Fantastic. Really great with integrations. And then Phantom is another one. And I think it's mostly free, integration wise. I. I can't remember offhand how flexible it is, but those would be the three that I would look into.

0:10:25 - (Alane): Yeah, those are my three that I recommend.

0:10:27 - (Micah): Same Microsoft copilot's built in and does it. But then you have issues with getting that data out and taking action on it. And again, integrations and some of the summaries are. So take, take it with a grain of salt. But Otter, you know, just be very cautious. On that one. Sorry, Otter.

0:10:46 - (Alane): I can't tell you how many people have said I installed it and now I cann get rid of it.

0:10:51 - (Micah): What I would say is Otter is great at the transcription.

0:10:55 - (Alane): I do like it for when I'm practicing for my speaking engagements. I do use it because I hold my phone like a microphone and I have Otter app and then I can see what I said.

0:11:04 - (Micah): See, that's a brilliant use case.

0:11:06 - (Alane): Yeah. So, you know, I don't need to use grain to record me as, as a video. I just need to see how I said things and what I liked. So there's a positive. So I think the biggest thing, whether you take our recommend recommendations or don't, is that you are looking for something that has some type of integration, some type of API access that you can use so that you can take it from the software that you recorded in to the next steps that you want to have it in. So we are using it to auto populate meeting notes into pipedrive after we do a call so that everything is there with, you know, it's a client relationship manager. So we want those call notes to be in there.

0:11:47 - (Alane): And then we're also using it for other integrations with things like ClickUp and stuff. So that would be the key piece.

0:11:53 - (Micah): Yep, yep. Yeah, I think you know this. I, I don't know, I don't want to make a big, big claim here, but I'm having a hard time seeing how not all meetings are going to go this route in the near future.

0:12:11 - (Alane): I agree. And we always talk about, you know, what does our future look like and with AI. And you can't imagine running your business without an email address. Right. Like we're not sending faxes and handwritten letters to each other for the most part. Right. You use email. Well, that is going to be so ingrained in what we do in the future that everybody's going to be using these things. It's no longer going to be the future.

0:12:37 - (Alane): It is, it's now.

0:12:38 - (Micah): The now.

0:12:39 - (Alane): The now. So you can make work harder for you and you know, reject doing these tools or you can really start making it easier but also making it more valuable.

0:12:50 - (Micah): Yeah. So we, we do talk about this a lot, Alane, where it's, it's like not another platform, but this is the case where maybe it's just get over it.

0:13:01 - (Alane): Well, I, I can do a case on this that get over it I think should be at the top of the list, but higher than that is I don't even know what we pay for all of our users to use grain, but I don't either.

0:13:15 - (Micah): That's how valuable it is. I don't care.

0:13:18 - (Alane): Yes, because if it saves them one hour a month in time, it has paid for itself. So will it save an hour of time? Absolutely. It saves an hour a day of time. With the amount of client meetings that.

0:13:31 - (Micah): We do, it saves an hour a meeting of note taking and trying to go back to your notes and think, God dang it, why did I forget to write down? I knew we talked about X, but I didn't write it down and now I can't remember. And now I've got to ask the client or I've got to ask the other team members that were in the meeting, or I got to make it up and hopefully the client won't notice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

0:13:55 - (Alane): Absolutely. So it saves so much time, it makes the time that we are together better and it produces a more valuable result. No, I mean with the client or our internal needs. Not. Not you and I.

0:14:09 - (Micah): Got it. All right, so let's. Let's go ahead and summarize. Alane, I think the reason that you brought this one up today is because we hear it so often. You and I have been talking about it. There's so much value in being able to record your meetings. Having an AI note taker, tying that to an AI agent that can automate the creation of the tasks. That reminds me, there's one piece in this that I think, you know, I did a presentation last week in front of about 12 business owners and they pointed out, hey, every example that you gave still includes humans. And I'm like, absolutely.

0:14:47 - (Micah): Because we can't just have AI do everything for us. It's a tool that humans get to use. Cool. So there's my little soapbox on that. But how does that apply to this? Super quickly, as we're going through this summary we've got, you're recording a meeting, it's automatically transcribing it. That transcription is going to an AI agent. That AI agent's going, here's all the action items that make sense based on the transcript. It automatically adds it to your click up Asana, Monday, etc.

0:15:18 - (Micah): At that point, that's where the assistant or yourself or somebody who is on the meeting needs to be a human, goes to the action items while the meeting's fresh in their mind. Review the action item because it was created in 60 seconds or less and go. Is this right? Yes or no? Do I need to edit it? Do I need to make modifications Do I want to add a little bit to the description? Do I want to mention somebody to bring them into the loop?

0:15:46 - (Micah): That's where humans are using the tools like this to make it super, super valuable.

0:15:53 - (Alane): Right. We're the creative, strategic ones, and AI is literally our assistant waiting to help us be better at those things.

0:16:03 - (Micah): Yeah, don't say that out loud, because then the AI will. They're coming after you.

0:16:08 - (Alane): No. Did I hurt their feelings?

0:16:10 - (Micah): So, yeah, I think, you know, if we compare that with, you have a meeting, you record all the notes, then you try to turn that into action items, and by the time you're at Action Item 3, maybe this happens to nobody else, but it does happen to me. You're almost like, oh, man, what was that fourth action item? What was that fifth action item? And you're going back to your notes and you're kind of losing your train of thought. And maybe a slack came in, turn off your notifications episode, I don't know.

0:16:38 - (Micah): But it was recent. And going into just getting stuff done versus 60 seconds. You have all your action items created. Everything's fresh in your mind, and you're off and running. To be more productive with work.

0:16:55 - (Alane): And that's what we get, to be more productive doing the things that we enjoy doing.

0:17:00 - (Micah): Yes. So that we can work less hours and spend more time with loved ones.

0:17:07 - (Alane): Or doing our hobbies, whatever it is that you enjoy doing.

0:17:10 - (Micah): Yes.

0:17:11 - (Alane): So if you like any of the ideas that we talked about and you're looking at trying to implement some of the automation, trying to identify what might be the best platform to go with, we'd love to chat. Contact us. Micah and I love helping companies automate their workflows.

0:17:28 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai for free content and tools for automating your business. Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:17:53 - (Alane): Bye for now.