AI Note Taking: Everything You Need to Know

You’ve had an important meeting on your calendar for weeks. At the last minute, a conflict popped up, and you couldn’t attend. When you ask your team for a recap, you discover no one took meeting minutes. They can give you the broad strokes, but you can’t help but feel out of the loop.

Luckily, AI note-taking is helping to eliminate this common challenge.

More and more businesses are turning to AI note-taking tools to capture meeting notes in real time. This lets attendees stay fully focused, and makes it easy for team members who couldn’t make it to easily catch up later. AI note-taking is shaking things up at work — improving communication, boosting efficiency, and helping teams tackle everyday challenges.

The emergence of AI note-taking

AI features and capabilities have come a long way, especially in the last few years. Generative AI is becoming a powerful tool for saving businesses time and boosting productivity. 

AI note-taking technology, in particular, has made huge leaps. These tools can now accurately summarize chats, meetings, presentations, and more. They even provide transcriptions, complete with speaker identification for added context. One of the coolest features? AI can generate ideas and suggestions based on the summaries, making it easier for teams to decide on next steps and keep things moving.

 

How AI note-taking works

AI can take notes for any meeting: a weekly touch-base with your team, a quarterly all-hands meeting, or a client presentation. AI note-taking sessions are manually initiated by someone in the meeting. Then, after the meeting, AI generates comprehensive meeting notes, typically with a transcript, attendee list, key points, and action items, and sends them to relevant team members in a shared channel or workspace.

Here’s how to use Slack AI to take notes in a huddle:

• Prompt AI. Manually initiate note-taking by selecting the AI notes icon in Slack.
• Attendee moderation. Everyone in the huddle is notified when AI note-taking is initiated. A banner indicating that note-taking is underway will appear on the screen until the huddle ends or someone turns off the feature. Any attendee can stop or resume note-taking at any point during a huddle.
• Note-taking. Slack AI takes notes, transcribing the meeting in real time. In addition to a meeting summary, Slack AI can generate next steps based on the context of the meeting.
• Review notes. AI-generated summaries and action items are automatically shared in a canvas within the huddle thread for review.

AI summarization

When it comes to AI summarization, the quality of AI output depends on the quality of the data it has to reference. Many popular and public generative AI programs are trained to identify patterns, interpret meaning, and make correlations using open source data. While gen AI trained on open source data — the internet, for example — can deliver unexpected or inaccurate results from time to time, AI trained on private networks that source limited data, such as Slack AI, boosts accuracy and relevancy in generated summaries.

Benefits of integrating AI note-taking into your workflow

As business needs evolve, new software and tools are implemented, but old technology isn’t always retired. Enterprise companies might use thousands of applications, while smaller businesses use tens to hundreds. As a result, teams spend their days toggling among tabs to track down information and stay productive — which can feel like a full-time job on its own.

Harvard Business Review found that a single employee at a Fortune 500 consumer goods organization switched apps and windows more than 3,600 times in an average day. Psychology and neuroscience have shown that jumping between tasks — or “context switching” — is not only time-consuming, but also cognitively taxing.

That’s where integrating AI technology with your work operating system (OS) can help. For example, Slack has built-in AI tools — like AI note-taking — that can automate routine tasks and support employees in the applications they already use, helping streamline workflows, boost productivity, and save time.

Improved productivity, efficiency, and collaboration

AI note-taking can boost organizational productivity in many ways, from summarizing entire interactions to generating action items and sharing them with meeting participants. That means the days of rapidly taking notes by hand — hoping you didn’t miss any key details — are over.

According to a Gartner survey, 47% of digital workers struggle to find information they need to do their job — including information from meetings. AI note-taking saves employees time by recapping meetings, and it makes finding information afterwards simple. Now, workers can go directly from a meeting to their assigned tasks without disruption. Meeting summaries and transcripts can also help teams prepare for meetings, presentations, and status updates.

Improve post-meeting efficiency, eliminate gaps in communication, and quickly bring new or absent team members up to speed with automatically distributed, AI-generated action items. AI can also offer collaboration suggestions based on conversations, providing opportunities for siloed team members to work together.

Challenges of AI note-taking

While it can support your workflow, AI note-taking comes with some challenges. Fortunately, they can be easily mitigated with guidance from leadership. Here are a few examples.

• Accuracy. Everyone makes mistakes — even AI. Any AI-generated content should be reviewed for accuracy, spelling, and other language nuances. Slack AI-generated summaries can be edited for accuracy and context before they’re sent out to the team.
• Data and privacy. Select an AI note-taking tool you trust. Some open source AI shares data with external, third-party LLMs. Keep private information secure and work with AI that meets certifications for enterprise-grade security and compliance.
• Accessibility. For your team to be productive, your tool should support your native language. Slack AI note-taking currently supports English, Spanish, and Japanese (with more languages in development). Additionally, every employee with access to AI note-taking tools should be properly trained to utilize the full range of benefits.
• Knowledge gaps. AI note-taking is human-like, but it’s not human — it only has context for the data and information it’s been trained on. In some cases, this may expose knowledge gaps that only humans can fill. Always review AI-generated content for missed nuances and wrong information.
• Organizational change. While implementing new tools and tech is complex and time-consuming, a strong change management plan can help. When leaders demonstrate enthusiasm and engagement around change, employees are more likely to buy in.

 

Choosing the right AI note-taking tool

As you select the right AI note-taking tool for your organization, some immediate considerations include budget, use cases, and the number of users who’ll need access. Here are some features to consider.

Key features to look for in an AI note-taking tool

Every AI note-taking tool comes with its own set of features designed to make work easier. While business needs vary, these features will likely support most organizations:

• Live transcription. Create a conversation record in real time that teams can refer to later.
• Speaker differentiation. Keep track of a multi-speaker conversation to differentiate between voices and create clarity.
• Mobile-friendly. Provide accessibility for remote and hybrid workers so everyone stays connected.
• Integrations. Boost productivity by integrating essential apps with your AI tools.
• Privacy and data. Protect your data to uphold enterprise-grade security and compliance requirements.

 

Boost productivity with AI note-taking

AI note-taking technology has advanced tremendously in recent years. Slack’s AI note-taker can generate comprehensive and actionable summaries for meetings, channels, files, and more. It can also create real-time conversation transcripts of all your essential meetings. Now, whenever you can’t attend a meeting or need the latest notes to prepare for your next client status call, post-meeting summaries can get you up to speed quickly. 

With Slack AI, you can integrate smart note-taking features into your work OS and essential apps to get more done, faster.