Everyone assumes AI meeting tools replace note-taking. I record every call with Quill as my notetaker. It captures who said what, generates summaries, tags topics automatically. My meetings are fully indexed and searchable.
And I take more handwritten notes than before I had any of this.
Here is the thing people get wrong about AI in meetings. The transcript captures what was said. It does not capture what mattered. A 60-minute strategy call produces pages of text. The AI summary tells you the topics discussed and the agreements reached. What it misses is the moment someone hesitated before agreeing to a timeline. The throwaway comment that revealed a team’s actual priority. The thing that was not said when it should have been.
I started noticing this about three months into using AI transcription. My notes from meetings were getting worse, not better. I was leaning on the recording. Why write anything down when the machine catches everything? But when I reviewed the AI summaries the next day, they felt hollow. Accurate, but hollow. The decisions were listed. The context behind them was gone.
So I went back to writing things down during calls. Not everything. Not a transcript. Just the moments that made me sit up. A disagreement that got resolved too quickly. A priority that contradicts what someone said last week. A resource constraint that nobody acknowledged out loud but everyone is working around.
The AI gets the what. My notes capture the why and the weird.
Now I run both systems in parallel. The AI recording gives me a searchable archive I can query across weeks of meetings. I use it for things like “what did we agree about the roadmap for X?” or “who raised the concern about Y?” That is genuinely useful. I can pull up a decision from three weeks ago in seconds instead of scrolling through my own messy handwriting.
But my handwritten notes are where the real PM work lives. They are a mess. Half sentences, arrows connecting ideas, question marks next to things I need to follow up on. They would make no sense to anyone else. That is the point. They are my thinking, not a record.
The combination works because each tool does what the other cannot. AI is perfect for recall and search. It is terrible at judgment. My notes are terrible for recall. I regularly cannot read my own handwriting. But they force me to process what I am hearing in real time, to decide what matters while it is happening.
If you manage an AI transcription tool and you stopped taking notes, try this: bring a notebook to your next meeting and have some sharpies ready. Do not write down what people say. Write down what you think about what people say. The AI already has the transcript. You need the interpretation. Start drawing, fiddling, sketching, noting. Each meeting deserves an own page and you are the meeting artist to fill it.
The best PM tool is still a pen and the discipline to notice what the machine cannot.
Leave a Reply