Using AI to prepare for meetings

I recently came across an interesting AI prompt that I’ll likely start using every Friday as I look forward to the week ahead.

David Cummings recently posted about some new AI use cases and they were all very insightful, but one I’ll be using a lot. He said:

Preparing for a Board Meeting
Last week, I attended a board meeting with 30 other board members. Prior to the meeting, we received a PDF containing the board agenda, a list of attendees, and governance items. I uploaded this PDF to ChatGPT and Grok, asking each tool to extract all the names and companies listed, then search the web for two to three news items or recent events about each person or company. Within a couple of minutes, they generated a bullet-point list of all the attendees, their companies, and relevant recent news. As a result, I entered the board meeting much better prepared, with a variety of topics to discuss during our dinner session.

I tried it for an upcoming meeting and the results were amazing!

I used this prompt: “Here is a list of people attending a meeting with me in a few days. Look at their names and companies and find any news items or recent events for each person or company.“

Below that, I simply pasted the list of people attending, copied directly out of my calendar. It was an ugly looking list, like this:

to: “john.smith@acme.com” <john.smith@acme.com>, Ron Jones <rjones@company.com>, “Johnson, Steven A.” <stevejohnson@gmail.com> … (with a…