You will be able to get a summary from a transcript that people can act on, not just a recap.
When you ask an AI assistant to summarise a meeting, it usually writes a recap. A recap tells people what happened. A useful summary tells them what to do next. People who were in the meeting, and people who missed it, mostly need the second kind. The aim is to ask for the useful kind in a prompt you can reuse after every meeting.
Jun Wei holds client calls and sends the client an AI-generated summary afterwards. Her first one was 900 words (an invented example, like the other figures in her story). It covered every topic in order, gave each speaker's views in turn and ended with a paragraph saying the meeting had been productive. The client replied with one line asking who is sending the revised programme, and when. The summary had recorded everything that was said and nothing anyone needed.
Give the assistant the transcript and ask for a summary in exactly four parts, with no others. These four parts are what people look for when a summary arrives in their inbox. Naming them in the prompt also stops the assistant from writing a narrative of the meeting, which is what it does by default.
Decisions made: what the meeting agreed, stated plainly. Leave out the discussion and the options considered, and include only what was settled. For example: "The workshop moves to the week of 14 July." Action items: each one states what is to be done, who owns it and by when. For example: "Jun Wei to send the revised programme to the client by this Friday." An action with no owner tends not to happen, and an action with no date tends to happen late. Open questions: things raised but not settled. For example: "Whether the second day can run at the client's own premises is still open." Listing them stops them from quietly disappearing. Follow-up needed: anything to check or chase outside the meeting, such as a figure someone promised to confirm or a person who needs to be told.
Meetings often end with some actions that have no owner or no date. Someone says "we should look into the venue" and everyone nods. If you ask an assistant for owners and deadlines, it will be tempted to fill these in, perhaps by picking the person who spoke most about the task or a date that sounds reasonable. Tell it not to guess. A missing owner is marked UNASSIGNED and a missing deadline is marked NO DATE.
A summary that says UNASSIGNED is honest, and it prompts someone to take the task on. A summary that quietly gives a task to the wrong person causes confusion and sometimes resentment. The gaps are often the most important thing a summary can show. If half the action items say UNASSIGNED, the meeting did not really decide who does what, and your follow-up email can point that out.
Most transcripts include timestamps. Ask for the timestamp next to each decision and action item so you can jump to that point and check what was said. Checking then takes a few quick lookups, and you don't have to re-read the whole transcript. Timestamps also make the summary easier to defend: if a colleague disputes a decision, you can point to the moment it was agreed.
Lesson 5.2 of Working with AI assistants, "Make it quote and point to the source", used the same idea for documents. A meeting transcript is just another source, so asking for timestamps applies that habit to meetings.
Nobody reads a long summary of everything that was said. Put a length limit in the prompt, for example no more than 200 words, or no more than one line per item. For a long, complex meeting, send the short summary with a link to the full transcript for those who have access. That works better than a long summary that hides the three actions that matter.
Jun Wei rewrote her prompt using all of this. It gives the assistant the transcript and asks for four sections: Decisions, Action items, Open questions and Follow-up. Each action must have an owner and a deadline. If either one is not clearly stated in the transcript, the assistant writes UNASSIGNED or NO DATE and does not guess. The transcript timestamp goes in brackets after each decision and action. Each item gets one line, the whole summary is no more than 200 words, and the prompt tells the assistant to leave out any general recap or comments on how the meeting went.
She saved the prompt in her project next to her voice guide, so it is one paste away after every call. Her next summary was 140 words. The client replied: "Perfect, thanks."
Now write your own version of the prompt with the four sections and the instructions on gaps, timestamps and length, and save it somewhere easy to reach. Then try it on a transcript, either one of your own or a practice one. Use the timestamps to check each decision and action against what was said.
Write a reusable meeting summary prompt with these four sections and test it on one real or practice transcript.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).