How to Use AI to Summarise Meetings, Emails, and Documents
A strong summarisation workflow saves hours each week and improves clarity across teams. Save your templates, refine them weekly, and ensure stakeholders receive summaries in the format most useful to them. **Tools used:** ChatGPT, meeting recorders, document parsers.
Context and Background
Information overload is one of the biggest blockers to productive work. Teams spend hours reading emails, reviewing long documents, and revisiting meeting notes in search of the information that matters. AI offers a faster, clearer way to turn raw information into actionable summaries that preserve meaning without unnecessary detail.
When used correctly, AI can extract intent, sentiment, decisions, risks, opportunities, and gaps. It can also rewrite content in formats tailored to specific stakeholders.
Use cases
meeting summaries, inbox clean up, long document reduction, policy explanation, sales call notes, and research consolidation.
Deeper Explanation
AI is strongest when it understands context and intent. For meeting summaries, specify the meeting type and desired outputs: decisions, action items, ownership, deadlines, and unresolved questions. For emails, ask AI to extract the core ask, urgency level, required response, tone, and any implied commitments. For documents, instruct AI to identify the primary argument, supporting evidence, gaps, and implications. Provide one or two examples of summaries you consider excellent so the AI learns your preferred tone and structure.
Tools used
ChatGPT, Otter exports, Gmail threads, document readers.
Expanded Steps
Gather Inputs. Collect meeting transcripts, email threads, or documents.
Tell AI the purpose of the summary and who will read it.
Ask AI to extract key points, decisions, blockers, risks, follow ups, and next actions.
Request different summary formats such as bullet points, executive summaries, or stakeholder specific views.
Ask AI to flag contradictions or unclear sections.
Create reusable summarisation templates for consistency.
Try These Prompts
Universal Summarisation Prompt
You are a senior communication analyst. Summarise the material I provide by extracting: 1) key points, 2) decisions, 3) risks, 4) action items with owners, and 5) unresolved questions. Keep the summary concise and structured.Stakeholder Summary Converter
Rewrite the summary above for different audiences: executives, managers, clients, and technical teams. Adjust tone, detail, and framing for each audience.Variations and Alternatives
Different workflows benefit in different ways. Leaders can receive short executive summaries. Analysts can request evidence maps. Sales teams can extract call notes with next steps. Operations teams can summarise SOPs. Product teams can summarise user feedback.
Use cases
multi team communication, research-heavy roles, decision support, and preparing updates for stakeholders.
Final Notes
Try summarising your next meeting using this workflow.
Ready to experiment?
Pick one of these prompts and see where it takes you. The interesting bit is not just getting results - it is discovering what happens when you tweak the parameters or combine different approaches. If you end up with something unexpected (whether that is brilliantly unexpected or amusingly terrible), we would genuinely love to see it.
Share your results, your variations, or the weird tangents you went down trying to get things just right. That is often where the best insights come from: the collective trial and error of people actually using these tools in practice.
And if you found this useful, we have got plenty more practical how-to guides covering everything from creating images for your blog to helping you automate boring work tasks. Each one is built the same way: real techniques, actual examples, no fluff.
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