Why the heck aren't you using an AI notetaker yet?

Every day, I get useful reminders and insights from my AI notetaking app—and every day, I’m amazed that there are people who are still sitting on the sidelines with these tools for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense. It’s time to stop worrying and demystify what AI notetakers are, how they work, and why you shouldn’t be worried about them.

What’s an AI notetaker?

If you’ve missed the memo (which might be because no one took notes), AI notetakers are tools that join your Zoom, Meet, or Teams calls—either as a silent participant or in the background—and automatically take notes, record, summarize, and even pull out action items. They produce a page for each meeting that looks something like this:

“But what about privacy and security?”

Believe me, I know: Privacy is critical, particularly for organizations working in the political space!

But we already hand over a vast amount of information to cloud providers to perform a service to us, and feel pretty confident that they’ll take the appropriate steps to protect our privacy. Consider what we share in Google Workspace, Slack, and even on Zoom itself.

Probably the biggest concern that most people have is that the notetaking service will allow meeting notes to be fed back into a Large-Language Model (LLM) for “training” purposes, where information might then show up for other users. But none of the mainstream services allow the AI services they rely on (Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google Gemini) to train on the data. This is using an already-established precedent in the “enterprise”-level contracts they use with these AI services to not train on the data provided. (Here’s an example from OpenAI.)

Most services also attest to various compliance regulations. For example, here’s Fathom’s list, showing that they’ve been security audited by an outside organization, and that they are HIPAA compliant, and also follow both the European Union and California’s privacy laws.

Okay, so which service should we actually use?

🥇 Fathom

Here’s the one I use on a daily basis. If you’re just looking for a fast, easy, and genuinely useful AI notetaker, Fathom is a great choice. At the most basic level, It’s free. It integrates directly into Zoom and produces organized, time-stamped summaries that even breaks out highlights. You can copy and paste, share, or just archive it all.

It does, however, require that a bot join your call and participants will see that the meeting is being “livestreamed” to the Fathom service, which can cause some questions.

There’s a few others you may want to consider, like:

• Fireflies.ai

• Otter.ai

• Granola

You can learn about these, and other options, in this Zapier tutorial.

When should you not use one?

If you’re meeting with lawmakers, clients who haven’t consented to recordings, or you’re discussing sensitive strategy, you should stop the notetaker from joining or remove it from the meeting.

Try one out in your next meeting

See if it doesn’t make your life easier, and put behind you the need to keep your head down nearly transcribing the whole meeting, or requiring someone else to do the same for you.

If you run into any issues, questions, or concerns, drop me a line and I’ll help resolve them!