From the smallest charities to the largest multinational corporations, organizations have traditionally viewed keeping minutes as a necessary evil, endorsing them as a critical tool for documenting corporate decision-making, but often bemoaning the time, expense and drudgery associated with their preparation.

Now, AI tools that record, transcribe or summarize meetings are touting their ability to produce high-quality minutes at a lower cost. It is worth closely examining, however, what these tools actually produce. Traditionally prepared minutes are a carefully curated record: a concise, official account that a board reviews and deliberately adopts. AI note-taking tools instead generate (or at least attempt to generate) a verbatim transcript or an automated summary of everything that may have been said. Labeling an AI output “minutes” no more makes it so than calling a rough draft a “contract” makes it binding. Raw transcripts and automated summaries become minutes only after careful human curation, and the gap between AI-generated outputs and curated records drives most of the benefits (and most of the risks) discussed below.

Read the full article to learn how organizations can balance AI efficiency with sound governance and risk management.