How To Write and Automate a Meeting Summary for Optimal Outcomes

One meeting can contain dozens of talking points—like progress, feedback, and critical decisions—and this crucial information is easy to lose track of without thorough documentation. Taking comprehensive meeting notes helps you manage these details, but that puts extra pressure on your notetaker, adds another task to your team’s to-do list, and introduces human error.

An AI meeting summary improves your organization, and record-keeping provides attendees with a quick, informative reference to discussions and decisions. Learn to write an effective meeting summary and how to simplify the process with AI.

Although using an AI meeting summarizer is the fastest, most effective way, you can write a successful meeting summary by following these seven tips.

7 best practices for creating meeting summaries

If you’re a leader in charge of your organization’s meeting policy, you can share these best practices with meeting hosts and attendees to ensure consistency in everyone’s meeting summaries. We recommend using a meeting summary tool like Fellow for more accurate summaries and increased efficiency.

1Thank attendees for their participation

Start the meeting summary by thanking all members for their ideas and time. You can build a strong culture of collaboration and engagement by showing employees their contributions matter. This simple act improves trust and productivity and positions you as a healthy, people-first company.

Appreciating participation is also vital to encourage a positive attitude toward work discussions. Employees look forward to meetings when they know their thoughts are respected and recognized.

2Summarize the most important decisions

Prioritize crucial insights and decisions in your meeting summary and determine which details to exclude. Not everything discussed needs to appear in a good meeting summary—even a short session can have many talking points, including minor status updates and small talk. Focusing on critical outcomes gives your meetings more purpose, helps you act on time-sensitive actions, and ensures nothing slips through the cracks.

3Attach relevant materials

Boost transparency by attaching relevant materials to your meeting summary, such as slide decks or spreadsheets. When critical materials are included in the summary, you reduce back-and-forth messages, and everyone can easily review key details. Team members who can’t attend the meeting also appreciate the visibility and direct access to information.

When you use a meeting agenda tool like Fellow, your meeting materials and summaries are centralized in one place.

4Highlight meeting action items

Promote accountability by including action items determined during the discussion. Clearly state each one, who’s responsible for it, and when it’s due. For example, you might write an item as: “@Monica, reach out to Dahlia Group and confirm the event date by 08/20.”

The essence of a good meeting is the outcomes, and detailing action items in your summary drives task execution by giving everyone a clear understanding of what to do.

5Organize items by importance and impact

Document every decision made during the meeting, organizing them by importance and impact. Dedicated notetaking lets you track this information, and using those notes to build a concise summary encourages clear communication and transparency among all stakeholders. This also creates a paper trail to ensure clarity and mitigate miscommunications.

6State the next meeting’s date and time

Schedule a follow-up meeting to maintain momentum and ensure future attendance. This gives teammates ample time to clear their calendars and encourages continuous progress on critical initiatives. For example, if you’re working on a new content calendar with a client, establishing the next meeting in your summary ensures you touch base and finish the plan before the next quarter.

Stating the next session’s date and time also boosts engagement when the discussion ultimately takes place. Teammates have time to organize documents and presentations, consider questions to ask, and prepare to chime in with thoughtful kudos.

7Share the meeting summary promptly

Circulate the summary soon after the meeting to give all attendees immediate access to decisions, action items, and materials. This keeps the conversation fresh in everyone’s minds, promoting accurate action planning and mitigating the risk of forgotten details. Quick access to the meeting notes and summary also enables all relevant parties to add the follow-up meeting to their calendars.

Meeting summary template 

Email Subject: Meeting Summary [Meeting name and date]

How to simplify writing a meeting summary

Let’s go beyond the basics. Here are a few tips for using meeting management software like Fellow to write meeting summaries with AI.

Tim Armandpour, Chief Technology Officer at PagerDuty, uses AI to complement and empower his human workforce:

“[AI] creates more time and headspace to go solve bigger and more impactful problems.”

Take collaborative notes

Collaborative note-taking promotes cross-functional alignment and participation. All attendees recording discussion points throughout the meeting helps them digest and retain every detail. 

Before holding a meeting, try co-creating a meeting agenda to proactively encourage collaboration. With Fellow, everyone can easily add talking points and action items using a simple agenda builder. This resource also lets people share their notes after the meeting, so all parties have instant access to each attendee’s perspectives and insights.

Assign action items

Assigning action items during meetings drives accountability and encourages productive follow-ups. And immediately detailing tasks mitigates the risk of pointless meetings. When discussions move too quickly, you might jump from topic to topic, making it easy for vital steps to become lost in the noise.

Fellow lets you assign action items in real time and monitor progress, encouraging clarity and timely task execution. Instantly sync these tasks with Asana, Jira, or Zapier to increase visibility and productivity. These software types are especially essential for virtual teams who can’t easily confer at a moment’s notice, helping employees in all locations avoid misplacing tasks across multiple tools.

Record the meeting

Use an AI summarizer to take meeting minutes and generate summaries, recording essential details and reducing human error.

Fellow’s AI-powered recording and transcription features capture vital decisions and talking points and produce concise summaries you can share in minutes. You also retain an archive of previous recaps and recordings to improve future decision-making.

And no need to worry about security—Fellow maintains strict confidentiality measures and adheres to regulatory requirements to keep your company data safe.

Gather critical materials 

You need all relevant materials at hand to write a thorough meeting summary, so gather them ahead of time to ensure nothing slips by. 

Fellow’s seamless integrations with other tools make retrieving essential items like documents, presentations, and slide decks easy. Take advantage of integrations with Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, and Zapier to import crucial files straight into your Fellow meeting summary.

How to use Fellow to automate meeting summaries

The Fellow AI Meeting Copilot automates your meeting minutes, summary, and agenda, increasing productivity and visibility while saving your notetaker’s time. Switch on Copilot before your meeting—it runs in the background, catching vital details to prepare an accurate, comprehensive summary when you’re done.

Meeting transcription tools capture and organize key information so your whole team can engage in the discussion and contribute to important decisions, but not at the cost of your notes.

Move faster and smarter with Fellow

A solid meeting summary aligns your workforce on critical talking points and action items. Make meeting summaries a firm part of your meeting guidelines, but let Fellow do the heavy lifting.

Host meetings with Fellow and seamlessly share AI-powered summaries. After each meeting, review your AI Meeting Recap to view your transcription and summary. Also consult Ask Copilot, the AI assistant that gives you on-demand answers about past meetings.

Prefer video content? Check out your Recording Library for full recorded meetings and small, sharable clips.

FAQs

What is a meeting summary?

A meeting summary recaps a discussion, including key talking points, decisions, action items, and relevant files. This brief description helps attendees keep track of important details and informs anyone who couldn’t attend, increasing visibility and transparency throughout the company.

What’s the difference between meeting minutes and a meeting summary?

Meeting minutes are structured, formal reports that include attendees, dates, decisions, and talking points. They’re often highly detailed and serve as an official record of a meeting.

Depending on the type of meeting, you may use both summaries and minutes, although less formal discussions only call for a short overview. Use our meeting minutes template to quickly create a deep record of your discussion.

How long should a meeting summary be?

A meeting summary should concisely describe a meeting in 300–500 words and only include essential details like decisions, primary talking points, and action items. This is a quick reference that reminds attendees of important outcomes and gets other teammates up to speed. For a longer, detailed account of your meeting, opt for a transcription or minutes instead.