If you take the minutes for a board – as the board secretary, an executive assistant, or the administrator who holds the whole meeting cycle together – you'll know what the day after a meeting looks like. A recording or a rough set of notes on one screen, a blank minutes document on the other, and four to eight hours of careful reconstruction ahead of you before the draft is ready for the chair.
The frustrating part is that the raw material already exists. Teams, Zoom, and most other conferencing tools will hand you a full transcript of the meeting at the click of a button. What they won't hand you is minutes. Converting a meeting transcript to minutes – deciding what was discussion, what was a decision, and who agreed to do what by when – is where the hours go.
This article covers how BoardPro's AI Minutes closes that gap: how to create meeting minutes from a transcript, what the AI produces, and where you stay in control.
A transcript records everything that was said, in the order it was said. Minutes record what the board needs: what was considered, what was decided, and what happens next. Those are different documents doing different jobs, and turning one into the other is skilled work, not typing.
Generic transcription tools stop at the first document. They'll give you a summary, and sometimes a list of "action items," but the output doesn't follow your agenda, doesn't distinguish a passing comment from a formal resolution, and doesn't know that the motion on item six needs a mover and a seconder recorded. You end up restructuring the whole thing by hand – which is the work you were trying to avoid.
AI Minutes is built for the second document. It reads the transcript against the agenda you've already built in BoardPro and drafts minutes that are structured the way a board record should be.
The workflow has four steps, and only one of them is new.
That's the whole process. No new software to learn for the meeting itself, no copying and pasting between tools, and no change to how minutes are approved and distributed once you're happy with them.
For each agenda item discussed, the AI drafts three kinds of minute – the same three kinds a careful minute-taker produces by hand.
If an agenda item wasn't discussed, nothing is invented for it. The draft reflects the meeting that actually happened, which is what a defensible board record requires.
Anyone who has tried minutes transcription with a generic tool knows where it falls over: names, acronyms, and figures. A misheard acronym or a garbled surname takes longer to hunt down and fix than it would have taken to type the sentence yourself.
AI Minutes handles this differently because it can see more than the transcript. When your meeting has papers attached to agenda items – board reports, financials, proposals – the AI uses them as a reference layer. If the transcript garbles an acronym or a technical term that appears correctly in the board pack, the draft uses the correct version. Accuracy improves because the AI knows what your board was actually discussing.
Papers aren't required – AI Minutes works from the transcript alone – but if your board pack lives in BoardPro already, the draft gets better for free.
Minutes are a legal record, and accountability for what they say sits with people, not software. AI Minutes is built around that principle: the AI drafts, and you own the record.
Every generated minute is identified in the editor and can be edited, approved, or removed before anything is published. You keep full control over framing – the wording that matters for auditors, regulators, or a politically delicate discussion – and nothing reaches the board until you've signed it off. In practice, the AI gives you roughly a 90 per cent head start; your judgement covers the part that actually requires judgement.
That's a deliberate design choice, not a limitation. A tool that published minutes without human review would be a governance risk, not a governance product.
Board discussions are among the most sensitive conversations in any organisation, so it's worth being precise about what happens to the file you upload.
The transcript is processed securely through Azure OpenAI, with contractual guarantees that your content is never used to train or fine-tune any AI models. Transcript files you upload are deleted from BoardPro's storage within 24 hours of upload. Everything stays inside your BoardPro environment, with the AI only able to access content you already have permission to view.
Compare that with pasting a board transcript into a free consumer AI tool, where the terms around data retention and training are often unclear. For a board record, the difference matters.
The workflow above is the same regardless of which conferencing platform your board uses – record, download the transcript, upload it to BoardPro. But each platform has its own quirks around where transcripts live, how to switch transcription on, and how to make sure speaker names come through.
We've covered the platform-specific detail separately:
And if your board meets in person or hybrid, our help centre guide on getting a great transcript for AI Minutes covers capture options for the room itself.
Almost any common format your conferencing tool exports – including .vtt, .srt, .txt, .docx, and .pdf – will work. Download the transcript the way your platform provides it and upload it as-is. If you want to fine-tune your transcript setup, the help centre guide above covers the details.
No. AI Minutes generates the draft from the transcript alone. Attaching papers improves accuracy – the AI uses them to correct misheard names, acronyms, and technical terms – so if your board pack is already in BoardPro, you get that benefit automatically.
Treat the output the way you'd treat a competent first draft from a colleague: strong, but yours to verify. Every minute is reviewed by you before publication, and nothing is published automatically. The review step exists precisely because minutes carry fiduciary weight – the AI shortens the drafting, it doesn't replace your judgement.
Yes. Some conferencing tools (Teams, for example) create a separate transcript for each part of a recording. Upload all of them to the same meeting, and BoardPro stitches them together in order and generates one set of minutes. You don't need to combine the files yourself first.
You can add transcripts at any point, including after minutes have started generating, and you can delete a file you uploaded by mistake before generating.
No. BoardPro never records anything. You record the meeting with your own conferencing tool, and BoardPro only processes the transcript you choose to upload.
When you're ready here's how BoardPro can help