Should you allow AI to take your board meeting minutes?

They must provide your organisation with clarity on what was said and decided, accountability, and an accurate record of the meeting for now and the future.

Beware of the temptation to take short cuts with your minutes

Effective minute taking can be a burden for NFP organisations, especially when directors themselves need to take minutes, which compromises their ability to participate in the meeting. So it’s not surprising that many organisations are starting to embrace AI products to do the job of taking minutes.

Boards need to be aware of – and open to using – new technology in order to remain relevant. However, it’s also essential for them to ensure that when adopting new products, ideas and tools, they are mindful of the principles of good governance, including risk management.

The Institute of Community Directors Australia (ICDA) offers resources to support boards in making ethical decisions about AI, and it’s important to go through that process before hitting “record” on an AI-powered minute-taking product.

Questions to ask before relying on AI to take minutes

In assessing an AI product, consider how it stacks up against your organisation’s policies on privacy, data collection and data retention, and against relevant laws.

Also consider whether the use of AI – which involves recording and transcribing or summarising the meeting – will inhibit robust and open discussion by board members.

If it’s a free or low-cost product, does this mean the content of your meetings will or might be used to train large language models (LLMs) for general public use? The risks here are obvious: your board is almost certain to hold discussions that should not be made public, for legal, reputational or financial reasons.

Even if your content will supposedly not be used to train LLMs, we can’t assume any product is infallible, so it’s still wise to be selective about what information you make available to AI.

The size and nature of your organisation will have a bearing on your risk assessment. If you’re a very small incorporated organisation with a tiny budget, run entirely by volunteers, working to help local injured wildlife, your risk profile is different from that of a large healthcare organisation that employs hundreds of staff and has an annual budget in the multi-millions.

As a very small organisation, you may find a lot of benefits in using a free AI product to record, transcribe and summarise the proceedings of your meetings. It frees up a committee member to participate more fully in meetings, and the worst that can happen if your policies are accidentally breached or your data is leaked is not necessarily catastrophic – although you must, of course, do absolutely everything in your power as a board to assess and manage the risks, including reputational risks.

If an AI model hasn’t been trained effectively, it may not capture the information you need, or it may build biases or misunderstandings into its summaries. AI is typically unable to capture sarcasm, nuance or jargon accurately, so the minutes it produces may need work after the meeting to bring them up to scratch – more work than minutes taken by a person would need.

Over-reliance on AI may lead to a lack of human oversight of its inputs and outputs. Motions may be captured with inaccurate wording, discussion points may be assigned to the wrong people, and non-verbal communication, including voting by hand, is unlikely to be recorded.

It’s important that your organisation undertakes a thorough cost-benefit analysis of potential products to ensure they are fit for purpose, taking into consideration the time required for training, oversight and review.

Procedures for approving and storing minutes, and deleting draft minutes and recordings to ensure version control, must be rigorous. AI can only ever produce draft minutes: the task of confirming and approving the minutes as an accurate representation of a meeting remains with the board and cannot be delegated to AI.

Will you gain more than you lose with AI?

It’s tempting to want to hand over all administrative tasks to AI products, including taking minutes. Be aware that this can lead to a loss of skills and knowledge. While the process of taking minutes can be hard work, it benefits from skills that – so far – humans are better at than AI: listening, understanding and writing, all complex tasks that draw on knowledge of the human condition.

Some organisations are more likely to benefit from AI than others. For boards that have limited resources and where minute taking may compromise meeting participation by members, it can be useful in removing the administrative burden from members and freeing them up to focus on making good decisions.

Training AI to capture minutes within a consistent structure and format can contribute towards good governance and compliance by ensuring all legal and regulatory requirements are covered.

Using AI to produce transcripts can help with accessibility and transparency by providing an accurate verbatim record of a meeting. This can be particularly useful for board members attending meetings remotely, and for members who have specific accessibility needs.

Ultimately, the board is responsible and legally accountable for ensuring minutes are accurate, effective, and compliant with regulations and community expectations.

As long as there are human-centred safeguards in place to ensure accuracy and privacy, and as long as risks and costs have been properly considered, AI products are another handy tool in a board’s governance tool kit, helping to enable effective decision-making and accurate record-keeping.

More information

Community Directors Intelligence: The AI edition

Governance Guru: What does my organisation need to do to use AI ethically?

Community Directors artificial intelligence tools and resources

Board meetings tools and resources | Meeting minutes template | Overview of board meetings

The Minutes Handbook ($39)