How to Use AI to Take Meeting Notes and Boost Productivity

Even the best human note-takers can miss key points during meetings. Manually jotting down notes in a notebook or even Google Doc limits engagement, slows collaboration, and increases the risk of miscommunication.

There’s a smarter way: Learn how to use AI to take meeting notes. The hours lost by employees in meetings can cost you a lot of money, so use that time wisely with an AI note taker. Plus, the back-and-forth note exchange after the call gets frustrating and confusing.

An AI note taker like Fellow ensures your team captures every important detail. AI note taking is cost-effective, a boost for productivity, and quickly becoming the standard for 2025.

Here, we’ll take a closer look at why AI notes are such a game-changer, how Fellow can help, and our best tips for making the most of AI notes.

Why use AI to take meeting notes?

Employee satisfaction directly impacts performance and profits. And for years, many workers have seen meetings as an unpleasant experience—or even worse, a waste of time.

But meetings don’t deserve a bad rap. Creating a suitable virtual meeting environment and providing the right tools allows you to focus on a quality over quantity work culture and get more done during your weekly calls.

• Improve employee satisfaction: Free people from the burden of manual note-taking.
• Enhance focus and engagement: Participants can fully contribute without worrying about documenting every word.
• Create a single source of truth: Automatically generate searchable, shareable meeting records.

With Fellow, you can say goodbye to scattered notes and hello to organized, action-driven meetings.

How Fellow helps you take better meeting notes with AI

AI note-taking solutions like Fellow take the meeting stressors out of the picture, offering features like: 

• AI meeting assistant: Fellow AI is your personal meeting assistant, relieving note-takers of their meeting notes duties so they can focus on what’s really important — offering input. Fellows records, transcribes, and summarizes all your meetings, whether its Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meetings or from uploaded video or audio files. Then, Fellow delivers those detailed notes to a centralized library accessible to all team members. Plus, the “Ask Fellow” feature lets you ask things like “What should I follow up on in the next meeting?” and “What did I miss?”
• Action items: Alongside recordings and meeting transcripts, Fellow automatically creates action items highlighting key points and decisions. And Fellow integrates with all your notes and calendars, including Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. So if you miss a meeting, you can access action item lists later to identify your responsibilities.
• Auto-generated meeting agenda: Fellow takes cues from action items, previous talking points, meeting titles, and participants to create a relevant AI agenda suggestions for upcoming meetings.
• Suggested topics: Fellow works great for one-on-one meetings, too. A database of one-on-one topics based on previous calls and talking points keeps the conversation productive and engaging.

How to use AI tools like Fellow to take meeting notes

Taking advantage of Fellow’s AI features is simple — but following a few best practices ensures you get the most value.

1. ​​Capture complex discussions accurately

Since Fellow generates your meeting notes, you reduce the risk of subjective interpretations and miscommunication. But the organizer or moderator should still review notes immediately after the call to remove errors and confusing sentences. 

You can do more than edit notes post-call — collaborative features like real-time commenting on meeting transcripts allow employees to provide context and clarification to help everyone better understand each session’s takeaways. Plus, Fellow offers a recording library and the ability to cut “clips” from recordings so you can save and share accurate records.

2. Align team members on key takeaways

Since Fellow generates your meeting notes, you reduce the risk of subjective interpretations and miscommunication. But the organizer or moderator should still review notes immediately after the call to remove errors and confusing sentences. 

You can do more than edit notes post-call—collaborative features like real-time commenting allow employees to provide context and clarification to help everyone better understand each session’s takeaways. Plus, Fellow offers a recording library and the ability to cut “clips” from recordings so you can save and share accurate records.

3. Centralize meeting notes automatically

AI tools make it easy to automate note-taking so you don’t have to write or type each point by hand. And Fellow easily integrates with all your video conferencing and communication platforms. Use Fellow’s templates to track meeting minutes and enjoy having a centralized bank of automated meeting records. Plus, you can use Ask Fellow’s AI-powered search to answer questions.

This single-source-of-truth approach cuts down on admin work and encourages alignment across the organization. And with everything in the cloud, you’ll never lose your notes again.

4. Use insights to improve meetings

Fellow does more than note-taking — it can analyze your calendars, schedules, and interactions to offer insights about meeting habits and where you spend your time. It even tracks things like talk time and active participation levels.

Things to consider when using an AI meeting note-taker

While AI-powered tools are great for note-taking, knowing their limitations means you can make smarter, more ethical choices when using them. Here are a few things to consider.

1Lack of context

Even the best AI meeting note-takers might not understand the full context of discussions, which could lead to incomplete and misinterpreted transcripts. They mainly focus on transcribing verbal communication, overlooking non-verbal cues like tone and body language.

Thankfully, Fellow makes it easier to get the full context by connecting the summary, video recording, and transcript with timestamps. If something seems off, you can quickly check in to see what meeting context is missing.

2Capturing multiple speakers

An AI notetaker might struggle to match voices with the right names in meetings with multiple speakers and overlapping conversations. The tool might credit the wrong person or produce broken text, making the notes less accurate. This is actually a common complaint with many AI note takers, but Fellow excels at accurate transcripts and attribution. To help, stick to one speaker at a time and try to speak clearly with minimal background noise.

3Audio quality

Poor audio quality (often caused by background noise or technical issues) makes it difficult for AI tools to accurately capture words. Muffled voices, traffic noises, and static — like from remote workers with choppy WiFi — can lead the AI to omit important details you can’t recall later. Set yourself up for success with a quiet environment.

4Confidentiality

AI-generated notes may have sensitive information — anything from client deals and mergers to employee performance and financials. As a senior leader exchanging confidential details, make sure transcriptions don’t fall into the wrong hands.

With Fellow, you maintain complete control over who has access to each meeting recap. That means you can share a motivating customer call with the whole organization, but keep a one-on-one just between yourself and your report.

You can also pause and resume Fellow at any time during a call if a sensitive topic comes up. And, after, you can permanently redact sections from the recording, transcription, and summary.

Introduce Fellow to the team

AI tools may have some drawbacks, but the pros outweigh the cons when you use Fellow. With features like AI meeting summaries, AI transcription, auto-recording, and automated action items, we’ve taken big steps to reduce limitations so you can have more productive sessions. When you dive into Fellow’s desktop app or Chrome extension, you’ll discover other features that prove artificial intelligence for meetings is the way forward.

Whether you’re looking for AI meeting summaries or analytics to see employee productivity patterns, Fellow has you covered.

Check out Fellow’s pricing and get started with Fellow today.