BoardPro launches AI Minutes for board meeting drafts

BoardPro has launched AI Minutes, a tool that drafts board minutes from meeting transcripts. It is available to customers on the company's Premium and Ultimate plans.

The Auckland-based board management software provider says the product creates a first draft of minutes against a board's existing agenda, rather than requiring a secretary or administrator to write the record from scratch after a meeting.

Board minutes carry formal weight because they record decisions, actions and, in some cases, procedural details such as movers and seconders. In many organisations, they are still prepared manually, often taking several hours after a meeting ends.

BoardPro's new feature uses transcripts produced by conferencing tools already in use, including Zoom and Microsoft Teams. It can also combine multiple transcript files from a single meeting into one draft set of minutes.

The draft appears in the same editor customers already use to prepare minutes. Actions are inserted as tracked items with assigned owners and due dates, while discussion notes and decisions are mapped to agenda items already set up in the platform.

The system also uses board papers and reports attached to each agenda item. BoardPro says it cross-references those documents so names, acronyms and technical terms carry into the draft more accurately than they might from transcript text alone.

Human review

BoardPro has placed particular emphasis on the review process and the limits of the automation. Customers choose which transcript to upload, and an administrator can set the drafting style by matching the board's previous minutes or selecting a concise or detailed preset.

BoardPro does not record meetings or join calls through a bot, a point it says sets it apart from some providers in the wider meeting software market. Instead, users rely on their existing conferencing platforms to create a transcript, then upload that file for processing.

Once generated, the draft remains subject to human editing and approval before becoming the official board record. BoardPro says transcripts are deleted after processing and that uploaded material is not used to train third-party AI models.

"Boards don't exist to produce paperwork. They exist to make decisions that change something in the real world," said Penny Goodwin, Head of Product at BoardPro.

"Every hour spent wrestling minutes into shape is an hour a board isn't spending on the decisions that actually matter. If minutes are slow, hard to distribute, or hard to trust, they get in the way of exactly the impact a board is there to have. That's the whole reason we built this."

Board workflow

The launch reflects a growing effort by software providers to apply generative AI to routine governance and administrative work. While note-taking and meeting summaries have become common uses of AI in workplace software, board minutes present a more sensitive case because they form part of an organisation's formal record and may be reviewed by auditors, regulators or courts.

That brings greater scrutiny to accuracy, tone and process. It also helps explain why BoardPro is presenting the tool as a drafting system rather than an automated replacement for the person responsible for preparing minutes.

"The accountability for a board's record sits with the people who sign it, not with software," said Goodwin.

"So we drew a hard line: the AI drafts and structures, and the secretary makes every editorial call about what the board actually said. Nothing reaches the board pack without a person putting it there. That's how boards get minutes fast enough, distributed fast enough and good enough to drive impact without giving up control of their own record."

BoardPro was founded in Auckland in 2015. Its software is used by more than 4,000 boards and focuses on governance workflows, including agendas, board packs, actions and minutes.

The addition of AI Minutes brings one of the most time-consuming parts of that workflow into the same system. By linking transcript text to a pre-existing agenda and associated board documents, BoardPro aims to reduce post-meeting administration without shifting responsibility away from company secretaries or administrators.

Early users tested that approach before the wider launch. Rodney Grant, General Manager at the New Zealand Concrete Contractors Association, said his organisation ran the tool alongside its existing process during early access.

"We weren't sure how it was going to go, so we took our own minutes as well," he said.

"We didn't change a single line of what the AI produced. The capture was spot on and very professionally written."