Last week I wrote that AI note-taking is dead, because off the shelf AI notes have limited value.
A few people pushed back, since in the same post I told them to record more meetings, not fewer.
Both things are true. It depends on which phase of adoption you are in.
Here is how I think about the progression of AI note-taking value.
Phase 1: AI replaces human notes. Accurate summaries, captured action items, allows full attention in the room. Every serious tool clears this bar.
Phase 2: Perfect recall across the organization for meetings you were in, and meetings you weren’t in. Transcripts flow into the AI tool of your choice via MCP. What price did she quote? What did he commit to, and when? What has this partner said across the last five calls? The meeting becomes a living memory that anyone with the right access can query, days, weeks or months later.
Phase 3: Meetings become a springboard for agents and automations. Follow-up drafts, CRM updates, briefing docs before the next partner call, weekly digests, blog topic extractor, all grounded in real conversation history. Transcripts captured today feed the agents of tomorrow.
Somewhere along the way, the most AI-forward companies also find time to reinvent how their meetings work, skipping the status readouts, and focusing on debate, ideation, and decision making.
I am in awe, every day, of the strategic importance of this category. Turns out making sense of what people say at your company is hugely strategic.
But the notes themselves are not the thing.
That’s Phase 1 thinking, and note quality is table stakes across the category. The questions that matter: what happens to the transcript after the meeting ends, and how good of a job you are doing at driving org-wide adoption.