How Fireflies.ai Changed the Way We Run Meetings

Your meetings are great. Your memory of them is terrible.

You’ve had this problem before: you lead an important meeting to help further a key project. The meeting is fantastic. The attendees leave excited, enthused, and accomplished because of decisions made, visions cast, and next steps clarified.

You took a few notes, but you were so engaged that you, quite frankly, stopped writing anything down halfway through.

Then a few days pass. Maybe you go on vacation, or maybe you focus on putting out a few fires. Now a week’s gone by. You have vague memories about the meeting (after all, you’ve had another dozen meetings since then!), but the details vanished.

You can’t help but feel like a significant opportunity is gone. Now, it’s just another “remember that meeting we had?”

Our organization struggled with this phenomenon until last year, when we started recording nearly every meeting in our companies. And I’ll tell you what: we’ve found it to be genuinely valuable.

Here’s how it’s been helpful, specifically for implementing and managing projects that involve other team members.

No More Taking Notes

Okay, we’ll start with the obvious: when Fireflies.ai (our meeting recording software of choice) is fired up before a meeting begins, the pressure I feel to take notes vanishes. Now, I may still be taking notes, but I’m free to capture the most important points rather than worrying about capturing absolutely everything.

Furthermore, I can use verbal commands in the meeting to memorialize key moments. For example, if a to-do comes up, all I have to do is specify who is responsible and what the action is, and I know the post-meeting AI analysis will assign it properly.

The real win here: the attendees' minds are freed up to truly focus on making the maximum contribution to the conversation. I can genuinely listen, participate, provide meaningful eye contact, collaborate, and riff without worrying about notes at all. I feel like I’m a better participant when the mundane notetaking is being handled.

Increased Honesty

Since we declare all of our meetings are being recorded prior to starting them, everyone knows they are “on tape.”

I find that this naturally adds an additional layer of honesty to the conversation.

And I think this just plays into human nature. When we know we’re being recorded, we tend to listen to our own words more. We are a bit more careful to think before we speak. We more quickly correct things we say if, in the moments after the words leave our mouth, we realize they were inaccurate or lacking the “whole story.”

I notice this same phenomenon when I’m filming marketing videos: I am much more likely to recognize my own verbal missteps when on camera, because I am so intently listening to the words as they come out of my mouth.

Fireflies + AI Is the Real Magic

While the relief of not having to take notes and the increase in honesty during a meeting are reasons enough to record your professional meetings, the real magic happens when you roll meeting recordings into a project management workflow. Here’s how I do this:

Step 1: Use AI to Develop the Project

I start most projects (and Traction quarterly rocks) by working with AI to come up with the ideal project outcome and required steps to get there. For us, this results in an Impact Filter for each project/rock. Now the table is set.

Often, these projects and rocks require working with other team members over a period of time. So the next step is to schedule the first meeting and then...

Step 2: Have AI Generate the Meeting Agenda

Now that the AI has the Impact Filter as context, I explain who will be at the first meeting, their influence on the project/rock, and I work with AI to develop a meeting agenda. I edit it as needed, then pop this into the meeting invite and send it out.

Step 3: Record the Meeting

The day of the meeting I turn on Fireflies.ai, and walk through the agenda. The more words spoken, the better! All of it is being recorded, so my focus in these meetings is data gathering. Asking as many great questions as I can is the absolute best thing I can do.

Step 4: Feed the Transcript Back Into AI

After the meeting, I clean up the Fireflies.ai recording (mainly just identifying the speakers in the transcript, which takes all of 30 seconds) then I tell Fireflies to regenerate its notes (now that it knows who said what) and review the meeting summary. Once it all looks good, I download the meeting transcript (a .md file is best, but .pdf works too) and upload it back into my same AI chat thread where I started outlining the project.

Step 5: Work with AI to Establish Next Steps

AI reads the transcripts, compares them to the Impact Filter, and collaborates with me to come up with next steps. Sometimes that’s a work task for me or others, sometimes that’s additional fact-finding, and sometimes that’s scheduling the next meeting.

I continue this “meeting feedback loop” throughout the project/rock duration.

Wrap Up

I’m sure there are scenarios in which recording meetings, even with full participant knowledge, is unwise.

Perhaps a 1:1 turns personal and emotional. Perhaps legal counsel advises against it in a certain situation. Perhaps you just think this is creepy... to each their own!

But I will say this: my team and I find meeting recordings to be exceptionally valuable. We literally benefit from it every day. It’s reduced our note-taking anxiety during meetings, increased the honesty of our conversations, and has allowed us to accelerate our project/rock delivery to a great extent.

I hope you find this concept valuable!

As always, if you’d like to chat about rolling out concepts like this in your business, I’m here for you: scott@scottmonday.com.

My sister and I launched a podcast for sub-$20M business owners and operators. Episode 10, the season finale, is out!

We’d be honored if you’d give it a listen! You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever platform you prefer!

Things I've Enjoyed Lately: If you’re a leader trying to figure out how you might implement AI into your company, the book The AI-Driven Leader is a great resource. It has very little to do with the technology or the tactics and everything to do with the mindset and approach a leader takes in infusing AI into their organization. Highly recommend you pick this up if you want to stay at the forefront of this curve.