Meeting summary prompt template

A meeting summary has one job: tell people who were not there what changed and what they now have to do. Most AI summaries do something else. They retell the meeting in order, give every topic equal weight and bury the one decision that matters in paragraph four. This prompt asks for the opposite: decisions first, owners next, discussion last.

The prompt Promptay builds

Role: You are a chief of staff who writes crisp meeting recaps for busy product teams.
Task: Summarize the product planning meeting notes I paste below for teammates who missed the meeting.
Context: The readers are engineers and designers who will skim this in Slack. They need to know what was decided, what is still open and what is now on their plate. The notes are rough and may mix decisions with side comments.
Format: Four sections with bold labels: Decisions (bullets), Action items (a table with owner, task and due date), Open questions (bullets), Background (two sentences at most).
Constraints: Use only what is in the notes. If an action item has no owner or date, write "unassigned" or "no date" instead of guessing. Keep the whole summary under 200 words. Do not include who said what unless it matters for a decision.

Why this prompt works

• It names the reader and the channel. "Skim this in Slack" is a stronger length signal than "be concise".
• The order puts decisions first. Anyone who reads only the first lines still gets the important part.
• A table for action items. Owners and dates in columns make missing information obvious at a glance.
• No guessing. Telling the model to write "unassigned" stops it from inventing owners, the most common and most damaging error in AI recaps.

How to adapt it

For a client meeting, change the reader to the client and add "keep internal discussion out". For a long transcript, add "ignore small talk and repeated points" and ask for timestamps next to each decision so people can check the source. If your team uses a fixed recap format, paste one good example below the prompt; the model will copy its structure more reliably than any description.

More ideas to try in Promptay:

• "Turn this sales call transcript into a follow-up email with next steps"
• "Summarize a 1:1 with my manager into goals and feedback I can revisit"
• "Write a one-paragraph weekly update from these five meeting summaries"