AI note-taking for a consulting firm

You have just finished an hour-long client meeting. And now you have to spend another hour writing the summary.

Going back over your notes. Replaying certain passages. Putting the information back in order. Checking the decisions taken. Finding the next steps. Then rewriting the whole thing into a document clean enough to send to the client.

On an engagement with several meetings a week, that work adds up fast.

And the problem is not limited to the time spent writing. During the meeting, the consultant also has to choose between genuinely listening to the client and trying to write everything down.

That is precisely where AI note-taking can be useful to a consulting firm: record the conversation, get a transcript and obtain a first version of the summary, without asking the consultant to rebuild everything afterwards.

But a firm cannot settle for an automatic transcript. It then has to obtain the right summary format, separate what is meant for the client from what stays internal, find the exchanges from an engagement easily, and control who can access the information.

So the workflow that is actually wanted looks like this:

record → transcribe → produce a summary → review it → send it to the client.

It is across that whole chain that the time saved is really decided.

What a consultant expects from a summary

A document they can pick up, edit and use, not simply file away.

The need is quite concrete: consultants spend part of their time in client meetings, then have to turn their notes into summaries and syntheses.

The tool therefore has to help them during the meeting, but above all save them from starting from scratch once it is over.

The consultant has to be able to pick the document back up, check the important information and put it in their own words before sending it to the client.

The moments when note-taking really helps

Not all the meetings in an engagement have the same purpose.

They typically include:

• scoping, at the start of the engagement, when the need and the context have to be understood;
• interviews, when an engagement begins with several conversations with different people;
• progress reviews, where what matters is mostly what has changed since the last meeting;
• the final presentation, which builds on everything done before.

It is often the accumulation of these meetings that makes note-taking time-consuming. Between conversations with consultants, clients and internal meetings, summaries can quickly take up a lot of time.

The summary template, and what it cannot guess

A template can organise what was said. It cannot fill in information that was never given.

That matters when a template contains specific fields to complete.

Suppose your template asks for the details of an engagement. If that information was not mentioned during the meeting, it will not appear simply because the template asks for it.

The rule is therefore simple: if you want to find a piece of information in the summary, it has to have been said during the meeting or supplied to the tool some other way.

What a template can do

A template can, among other things:

• reuse the question structure consultants already work with;
• separate findings, decisions and next steps;
• produce a different document depending on the type of meeting.

For instance, you can have one template for sales meetings and another for team reviews, each built from your own framework.

What can go wrong

Managing templates can, however, cause trouble.

A consultant may select the right conversation type without finding the template they created. They may also want to edit or duplicate an existing template without knowing how.

Another situation: when a template does not deliver the expected result, the instructions sometimes have to be refined to get genuinely useful information into the summary.

So the template remains a key part of the setup. Before rolling it out to the whole firm, it is better to check that consultants know how to create, find and edit one.

One conversation, several recipients

The same meeting can produce two documents: one for the firm and one for the client.

The internal summary can contain the hesitations, the objections, the points still to be checked or the topics to revisit at the next meeting.

The document sent to the client does not need any of that. It should mostly cover what was decided, the important elements of the conversation and the next steps.

That is why the two uses can be separated from the start with two templates.

The point is also to standardise summaries. If several consultants work on similar engagements, each can use a shared framework while keeping the ability to edit the document before sending it.

Confidentiality of engagements

For a consulting firm, confidentiality comes before features.

Summaries can contain commercial, strategic or operational information about clients. So you have to know precisely who can access the recordings and the summaries.

Before rolling the tool out, several questions have to be settled:

• who can access the recordings of an engagement;
• which meetings should not be recorded;
• what happens to a consultant's access when they leave the firm;
• what the firm has to be able to provide if a client asks about the handling of their data.

Information on hosting, subprocessors and the commitment not to train models is set out in the data processing agreement and on the page about not training models on meeting data. The questions buyers ask are gathered in the compliance and sovereignty FAQ.

Those are the documents to be able to produce in a client file, rather than simply asserting that the data is protected.

Finding what was said, several weeks later

On an engagement running six months, the value of a recording is not limited to the summary produced on the day.

A few weeks or months later, you may need to find a specific exchange, check what a client had asked for, or revisit several interviews to prepare a new synthesis.

That is particularly useful when an engagement involves a lot of interviews.

Rather than going back over each meeting one by one, the consultant may need to select several recordings and apply the same summarising method to them.

Splitting meetings into chapters can also make it easier to find a specific passage. When the firm tracks its engagements in a management tool, the page fill your CRM after a meeting describes what reaches the record.

Search across history should nonetheless be treated as a working tool to build into the firm's habits, not as an automatic benefit of note-taking.

How does a firm put note-taking in place?

1. Choose which meetings are covered

Not every meeting in an engagement needs to be recorded.

Define the types of meetings concerned before rollout, rather than leaving each consultant to decide case by case.

2. Write the templates

Plan one template per type of meeting: scoping, interview, progress review, final presentation.

The simplest approach is to start from the frameworks consultants already use.

3. Set up access

Define roles and access scopes.

You also have to plan for what happens when a consultant moves to another engagement or leaves the firm.

4. Test on one engagement

Test the tool across a whole engagement rather than on a single meeting.

It is by using several meetings in a row that you really see whether the templates fit and whether the important information is captured.

5. Set the review rule

An automatically generated summary should not go straight to a client without a check.

Set that rule clearly from the start and make sure every consultant knows it.

6. Decide what joins the client file

The reviewed summary can join the client file.

The raw transcript is a decision for the firm.

So determine in advance what has to be kept and what can be shared.

What mistakes should you avoid?

1. Sending a summary without reading it

The document sent to the client carries the firm's name.

Even with a capable transcription tool, an error can appear, particularly on a proper noun, a figure or an important piece of information.

2. Expecting a template to invent

If a detail was never mentioned during the meeting, the template cannot retrieve it simply because it appears in its fields.

The expected information therefore has to be present in the conversation or supplied to the tool.

3. Using the same template for internal and client documents

The two documents do not necessarily have the same purpose.

The internal summary can contain objections or points to clarify. The client document should rather focus on decisions and validated elements.

4. Rolling out without settling access

Questions of roles and permissions always come up in the end.

Better to settle them before a consultant starts using the tool on a confidential engagement.

5. Discovering the template during the meeting

The template has to be prepared before the meeting.

If consultants have to look for their templates, edit them or work out how they behave during a client meeting, you lose part of the benefit you were after.

6. Promising the client an automatic summary

The first version of the document can be generated automatically.

But the firm remains responsible for the version it passes on to the client.

The automatic document is a starting point, not necessarily the final deliverable.

What we observe

The subject appears in around a hundred demonstration meetings and customer conversations between January and June 2026, including some sixty where the customer raises it.

By contrast, a single written support request concerns this profession, and it is about creating user accounts.

That mainly shows one thing: consulting firms regularly talk about this use when they discover the tool, but run into relatively few specific problems that require contacting support.

So the question to ask before rollout is not only about transcription quality.

It is rather:

who reviews → which template produces which document → for which recipient → and who can access it inside the firm?

Note-taking in a consulting firm: what to remember

Before opening the tool to all consultants, check these six points:

• Templates: do you have one template per type of meeting, built from your own frameworks?
• Internal and client: are the two documents clearly separated?
• Review: is the review rule clear and known to everyone?
• Access: who can see the recordings of an engagement, and for how long?
• Departure: what happens to summaries when a consultant leaves the firm?
• Documents: do you know what to provide if a client asks for guarantees about their data?

And one last question deserves to be settled before rollout:

Which meetings should not be recorded, and who makes that call?

Frequently asked questions

Can one conversation produce two different summaries?

Yes, by using two different templates from the same recording.

You can for instance have one template for the internal summary and another for the document meant for the client.

That avoids sending information by mistake that was only meant for the firm's team.

Can the template reuse the firm's question framework?

Yes. It is in fact a good way to build your templates: start from the questions and structures consultants already use.

That said, if the template asks for information that was never mentioned during the meeting, it will not be able to fill it in simply because it appears in the template.

Who can view the summary of a confidential engagement?

The people you have granted access to, according to the roles defined in your workspace.

That is a question to settle at configuration time, before starting a sensitive engagement.

Can you query several meetings from the same engagement?

That can be particularly useful when an engagement involves many interviews and meetings.

You may for instance want to revisit several recordings and apply the same summarising method to them.

If that capability is part of your working method, check exactly what is available before building your process around it.

Do you need video conferencing to record a consulting meeting?

No. A meeting held in a room can also be recorded from the mobile app.

The conditions for informing the people present are detailed on the page about recording an in-person meeting.

What happens when a consultant leaves the firm?

That is a question of roles and access to recordings.

Handle it at configuration time, by deciding who takes over the summaries of an engagement in progress.

What do you answer a client who asks where their data goes?

By providing the documents, not an assertion.

The data processing agreement names the subprocessors and the hosting regions. The page on not training models on meeting data covers how conversations are used. Those are the two documents to attach to a file.

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