Creating your Magic Pen: Leveraging AI for Internal & External Management Opportunities

I love a good pop culture reference, and Harry Potter is a regular go-to. I am constantly amazed by the technological advancements that mirror the magic contained in the books (say “Hey Siri lumos” to experience the Potter spell for light) and one of my favorite elements that has now come to life is Rita Skeeter’s pen.

For those of you not in the Potterverse, Rita Skeeter is a journalist with questionable ethics who interviews people, with her pen taking notes and crafting the interview at the same time. I was struck the other day that AI is giving us this tool – with some of the ethical concerns included.

Like many of us, I have been experimenting with AI – leveraging Chat GPT for both research and content drafting, as well as providing summaries of dense scientific texts and image creation. But the tool that I appreciate the most (at least this week) is an AI-driven note taker. (We use Fireflies.) Here is how you too can have your own magic pen:

It is nearly impossible to be a good scribe and a strategic contributor to a conversation.        

1)?????Committee Meeting summaries: one of the key challenges in association management is committee staffing. Committees require both admin support (meeting scheduling, agenda creation, note taking) as well as talent input (notes on resources, timing of key projects, ideas for speakers and content.) It is nearly impossible to be a good scribe and a strategic contributor to a conversation. With AI doing an exceptional job taking notes, it allows our staff to participate at a strategic level and also may reduce the number of staffing needed in various calls. (Note: I am not recommending this for board meetings due to best practices around not maintaining transcripts of board meetings, legal concerns, etc. Board meetings also tend to be robustly staffed by several team members. I would also suggest deleting the transcript of informal meetings, etc. once you have leveraged the note taker summary.)

2)?????Presentation notes and summaries: I recently gave a speech and pulled the AI notetaker in via my phone, leaving it on the podium as I presented. I had low expectations, but AI produced a great outline of my talk AND captured the Q&A – meaning it is now a richer representation of my presentation beyond the prepared deck. This means that it is now easy for me to create a blog, list of action items, etc. to follow-up on that content (stay tuned!)

3)?????Wringing more value out of the above: Once I looked at the summary of the presentation, I asked the AI notetaker (his name is Fred) to give me 5 ideas for articles based on the content captured. This combines the magic of Chat with the intel directly fed in via presentation and meeting IP. (Of course, always use paid versions and ensure you toggle the privacy buttons so that your information is not in the public domain.)

Using generative AI for these activities is what separates it (in my opinion) from enhanced search and predictive-text driven content drafting to providing true staff partnership. Worried that it could provide a true poison pen? Avoid this by making sure that AI is used in an appropriate, ethical way – protecting firm and association data, strategy and other proprietary information. Ensure that the resulting products are accurate, free of bias and reflect the ethos and voice of your organization. Most importantly, lean into the magic a bit, experiment and model what you want to see to your colleagues and members.

Erin Fuller is the chief strategy officer for MCI USA, and was one of those dorks standing outside of a bookstore each year waiting for the next Harry Potter edition to come out. Her welcome mat shows the Potter spell for “unlock” and is extremely embarrassing to her children.