As we look at adopting AI tools over the next year, one topic that is especially topical is the use of AI for note-taking. Taking notes and actioning information from meetings is at the core of the work we do at Risk Oversight and for most professionals in the world of internal control, internal audit, and governance. The ubiquity and ease of note-taking apps open a world of possibilities, but they also bear risks. It’s important that we as professionals and leaders understand and assess the advantages and disadvantages of the tools versus our traditional approaches to get the best of both worlds.
First, let’s start with the obvious advantages of AI note-taking and recording.
You’ve probably experimented with tools like Otter AI, CoPilot, or Teams, and the like. One thing they do shockingly well is take accurate (enough) recordings, transcriptions, and summaries. They are especially helpful for capturing meetings, brainstorming sessions, training sessions, walk throughs, and interviews. These tools give a helpful record for later reference and can be instrumental in helping you in generating documentation or content, like testing results, process documentation, reporting, proposals, or project plans based on your conversations.
OK, that’s about it for the good stuff. Now, the disadvantages.
But here are some of the disadvantages that we often don’t talk about enough:
- Collecting digital dust. Organizations collect, collect, and collect notes but have no system to access or use the information. In our experience, most transcripts and video recordings we see within organizations are never looked at again and are collecting digital dust.
- Delays and over-reliance. When we don’t have a transcript or recording, we are much more likely to process the information we hear in a shorter amount of time. This may mean writing back to a stakeholder, colleague, or client or making updates on project testing steps, design work, and other deliverables. We have witnessed a growing phenomena within organizations where auditors and internal control professionals are reviewing or turning around walkthroughs or meetings months after they have occurred.
- Confidential or important information. Another issue is that people are less prone to share confidential or sensitive information when they know they’re being recorded. Ensuring that people are open, transparent, and freely expressing their opinions is essential for driving the best results for audits, internal control, and risk management work.
And here’s the biggest disadvantage of all.
In our opinion, which may be unpopular and could make us sound like dinosaurs..
- You miss all the advantages of old-school note-taking. The key advantage of manual, old-school note taking has nothing to do with the notes themselves and everything to do with how it supports our thinking. Note-taking acts in many ways like an intermediary step that forces you to process information, discern what matters from what doesn’t, and synthesize and analyze the information you’ve collected. Studies have proven time and time again that old-school note-taking boosts our memory and recollection.
When you take classic old-school notes:
- You choose what information matters or not during a conversation and hone your skills of discernment.
- You capture points that matter to you to boost your skills of synthesis.
- You recap key points building your skills of analysis.
- You communicate your key notes, request feedback, and use your notes to take next steps.
The verdict.
In the consulting industry and professional services, we’ve heard claims that AI note-taking tools can save time on projects up to 80%. (ChatGPT itself estimates a 50-70% time savings from note-taking apps.) But we would caution that this sounds frankly too high in most cases. However, yes, we believe you can achieve this type of time-savings on certain meetings like status updates, planning next steps, step-by-step process review work, or anything more formulaic in nature.
But for work that requires analysis, processing, and exercising professional judgement – which is core to the work we do at Risk Oversight — we’d put the time-savings closer to 20% or 30% at this time. This is still colossal in our opinion!
How to get the best of both worlds.
Bottom line, here is a happy medium and you can have the best of both worlds. To speed up your ability to process notes, we’d recommend:
- Using the transcript from tools like Otter and then throw them into tools like ChatGPT to give you a stronger summary. But we’d caution you to lean on AI tools exclusively for your summaries — or else, they will be too woody and won’t give your work the human touch.
- Even if you are pressed for time, you can do a 5-minute recap to summarize your key thoughts, which could involve writing out your key thoughts or 3-5 key bullets. (By the way, I have a friend, who speaks these bullets into the transcription tool at the end of her meetings – which is another great technique.)
- Whether you use AI or handwritten or something in between, the success of your notes comes down to your ability and willingness to action information. That could mean, writing back to stakeholders sharing what you’ve learned, pulling information into key deliverables, or requesting further documentation or information.
Remember, having a transcript or summary doesn’t matter much if you aren’t going to do anything with them!
We hope that you enjoyed these thoughts on AI note-taking. This area is rapidly evolving and to be perfectly honest, our thoughts on the topic could change over time too. We’d love to hear your opinions on it too and what’s working or not in your work, role, and organization. Reach out to us to continue this engaging discussion!