If you're the person who writes up the minutes, you'll know the shape of the Monday after a board meeting. The recording is sitting there. So is a full inbox and the rest of the job you were actually hired to do. And somewhere in the next few days you have to relisten, decide what belongs in the record and what was just discussion, and format it all into the board's template. For most boards that's anywhere from one to five hours, every meeting, every month.
We think that's the wrong place for a skilled governance professional to be spending their time. AI Minutes is built to give most of those hours back – without taking the record out of your hands.
When we launched AI Assistant earlier this year, we said AI Minutes was next. We meant it, and we chose that order deliberately.
Minutes are the more sensitive ground. They're a legal record – in Australia, s251A of the Corporations Act requires companies to keep minutes of directors' meetings; in New Zealand, Schedule 3 of the Companies Act 1993 requires the same. They're the document a board may later need to stand behind. So before we built anything that touched the record itself, we wanted to get the foundation right: a capability that helped directors read and understand their packs, where the stakes of a wrong answer were lower and the trust framing could be established first.
AI Minutes is the step we took once that groundwork was in place. It's also the capability customers have asked us for most – which makes the sequence worth being honest about. We didn't ship the most-requested feature first. We shipped the one that let us prove the approach first, and then applied what we learned to the record.
You record your meeting the way you already do – in Teams, Zoom, or on a phone on the table – and download the transcript. BoardPro doesn't record your meeting; it works from the transcript you choose to upload. From there, AI Minutes maps that transcript against the meeting's existing agenda and produces a structured draft.
For each agenda item that was actually discussed, it can generate three kinds of minute:
There are two things which make the draft read like a board record rather than a generic summary. First, it can cross-reference the transcript against the papers attached to the meeting, so misheard acronyms, technical terms, and proper nouns come through correctly – the kind of error that otherwise sends you back to the recording to check. Second, it writes in your board's style. You can let it match the tone and detail level of your last two finished sets of minutes, choose a concise or detailed preset, or set your own instructions. More detail isn't the goal; matching how your board actually minutes is.
None of this asks you to change how your board works. If your meeting already lives in BoardPro with an agenda, the draft builds from what's there.
This is the core principle we’ve held to throughout, and also the one we note as particularly important that we’re precise about, because it’s easy to say and easy to break.
Fiduciary duty is non-transferable. A board can delegate a task, but not accountability for the record. So AI Minutes drafts; it doesn't publish. Every generated note, action, and decision lands in your normal BoardPro minutes editor, where you edit, reassign, reword, or remove anything before it goes anywhere. Nothing goes to the board until you've signed it off.
Here’s the tension, which we think is worth pointing out. If you still review every line, are you actually saving time? Yes – but the saving is in the drafting, not the reviewing. The slow part of the job was never reading the minutes; it was building them from a blank page, from a recording, from memory. AI Minutes gives you roughly a 90 per cent head start and leaves the last 10 per cent – the framing that matters for an auditor, the wording of a delicate discussion, the judgement call on whether something was a decision or a direction of travel – exactly where it belongs, with you.
That's a design choice and not a limitation. A tool that published minutes without human review wouldn't be a governance product. And like any AI, it can occasionally get something wrong, which is the other reason review isn't optional. The draft does the heavy lifting; the judgement stays human.
Board discussions are among the most sensitive conversations an organisation has, so it's important we’re precise about what happens to the file you upload.
The transcript is processed securely through Microsoft Azure OpenAI, under enterprise terms that mean your content is never used to train, retrain, or fine-tune any third-party AI model. Once the minutes are generated, the transcript file is deleted from BoardPro's storage. Everything stays inside your BoardPro environment, and AI Minutes only works with content you already have permission to see.
That last point matters. The risk with AI in the boardroom usually isn't the AI – it's the record proliferation around it: a recording here, a transcript there, an AI note-taker's output somewhere else, all under different retention rules. If your board hasn't set a position on what the transcript is for and how long it lives, that's worth doing before you lean on any AI minute-taking tool, ours included. We've written separately on how to think that through here: AI Minutes Are Not the Risk. Ungoverned Records Are.
Tip: Read our article – How to create meeting minutes from a transcript
AI Minutes doesn't close out the BoardPro AI story; it's the next step in it. We're continuing to improve AI Assistant based on how directors and secretaries actually use it, and AI Minutes will keep getting sharper as we learn from real board records in the same way. The sequence has been deliberate from the start, and it continues that way – each step earning the next.
More on what follows soon.
We're running a live webinar walking through AI Minutes end to end, from capturing a good transcript to reviewing the draft, with governance expert Alexie O'Brien and the BoardPro product team.
Register for the webinar · 18 August 2026 · 11AM AEST / 1PM NZT