Start with meeting notes
Most business people will tell you the same thing about meetings.
They wish they took better notes.
And they wish those notes actually helped them later.
Here’s the awkward part. You usually can’t have both.
If you’re scribbling the whole time, you’re not really listening.
If you’re fully in the conversation, you walk out remembering the vibe and forgetting the details.
That’s normal. It’s also where AI can help in a really simple way.
Why start here?
A lot of people think “getting started with AI” means buying a bunch of tools or rebuilding how the whole business runs.
It doesn’t.
Start with something you already do every week: meetings.
Sales calls. Client check-ins. Vendor chats. The weekly meeting where the same decision somehow comes up again.
Good notes from those conversations save time later. Bad notes (or no notes) create more meetings.
An easy way to do it
You don’t need a perfect system. Pick the option that fits how you already work.
On a Zoom or Google Meet call
Tools like Fireflies can join the meeting and take notes for you. When the call ends, you get a write-up of what was discussed.
In person
If everyone is okay with it, record on your phone. Same idea. You’re present. The recording becomes the notes.
No fancy tools?
After the meeting, take two minutes and leave yourself a voice memo. Who was there. What they wanted. What you said you’d do. Dump that into ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, whatever you already use, and ask it to clean it up.
Pen and paper or whiteboard person?
Take a photo. Upload it. Ask AI to type it out. You still think on paper. You just don’t lose the page.
Make the notes useful later
Taking notes is step one. Using them is the win.
Once your notes are typed out and saved somewhere, you can ask simple questions later:
- What did we promise this customer?
- When did we last talk about that project?
- Who was supposed to follow up?
That’s when AI starts feeling useful. Not because it’s flashy. Because you finally have decent information to look back on.
If you connect those notes to a tool you already like (Claude, a Grok bot, etc.), it gets even better. You’re building a little memory for the business, one meeting at a time.
Try this tomorrow
- Pick one meeting this week that usually gets fuzzy afterward.
- Use Fireflies, a phone recording (with permission), or a quick voice memo after.
- Save the cleaned-up notes somewhere you can find them.
- Ask one question from those notes the next day, just to prove it works.
That’s it.
The point
AI gets more helpful when your business feeds it good information.
Meeting notes are an easy place to begin. The conversations are already happening. Most of the useful stuff just disappears.
Catch more of it. Put it where you can search it later. You’ll feel the difference faster than you will from another random AI experiment.