As Artificial Intelligence continues to evolve, it’s crucial for PAs to adopt strategies that streamline tasks and make full use of the available tools that automate and simplify processes. In this article, JoAnn Daniels explores five actionable strategies that can help PAs enhance their efficiency when creating team briefs.
Drawing up a comprehensive briefing for your employerโs team (or your own) can be a time-consuming task. This is especially true when relying on information from multiple sources. You will likely need to scan through chains of emails, read monthsโ worth of meeting notes, and sift through piles of documentation to identify essential takeaways and create successful team briefings.
Thankfully, there are many trusted AI tools available to help you produce quality team briefings without spending hours, days, or even weeks on the task. Here are five key ways to utilise AI tools for creating team briefs quickly and concisely.
1.ย ย Automated meeting summarisation and analysis
Meetings provide a wealth of important insights for creating effective team briefings. That said, the process of taking detailed minutes, transcribing them, and analysing them can demand vast sums of time.
AI meeting assistants are here to help.
Tools like Otter, Granola, and Fireflies AI can automatically record meeting minutes and transcribe them into accurate text. Some also generate helpful summaries of team meetings for your reference.
When it comes to analysing meeting notes and extracting highlights, AI meeting tools can also instantly identify important topics and extract action points. This allows you to quickly review these points and use them to create clear and concise briefings.
An AI meeting assistant can virtually eliminate the need for you to take, organise, and read through meeting minutes manually. This functionality can save you countless hours of effort when drafting team briefs.
2.ย ย Summarising reports and documentation
The more comprehensive your team briefings and the better you communicate requirements and instructions, the more equipped your team will be with the knowledge, skills, and instructions they need to stay productive. Of course, creating detailed briefings often requires basing them on lengthy internal reports, documents, research papers, and other sources of data.
Integrating AI summarisation tools like Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant, Sharly AI, or Quillbot into your workflow can significantly simplify the process of summarising long documents and notes. Most of these tools allow you to upload documents or text directly. They will then quickly condense them into short, legible notes or bullet points. These notes will provide you with only the most essential information you need to consider.
Tools like Googleโs Notebook LM can even transform documentation into engaging podcasts and mind maps. These formats make it easier than ever to extract vital highlights from huge amounts of information.
3.ย ย Drafting Briefings with AI
Large language models (LLMs) and AI writing apps are major time-savers for drafting team briefings. Instead of writing them from scratch, you can use platforms like ChatGPT, Grok, Google Gemini, and Copy AI to draft your initial briefing documents.
Simply provide your AI tool of choice with your note summaries, action points, and other important inclusions, and the platform will generate a draft within minutes. This will provide you with a clear outline that you can edit, improve, and personalise for your audience.
Editing and refining an AI-generated draft will take a fraction of the time needed to write the draft yourself. AIโs powerful capabilities will also ensure that your draft contains all of the vital details your team needs to work effectively, without you having to remember to include them all individually.
4: Automated insights and data analysis
Data analysis is an entire career path on its own. As a busy PA, you may not have the time or resources available to analyse meeting and organisational data in depth. If your team briefing requires data-based insights, however, you can use AI data analysis and reporting tools to simplify your tasks considerably.
Platforms like Domo, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Julius AI are designed to process vast amounts of data from a range of sources. These tools can scan sources like cloud storage platforms, spreadsheets, and documents to collate data relevant to your briefing. They then use AI and machine learning algorithms to analyse this information and generate insights, underline notable trends, and more.
Once you have these insights on hand, you can include them in your briefings to offer your teams data-based guidance, without having to manually calculate statistics. You can also utilise an AI tool to create infographics, making your data more digestible and engaging for your team.
5. Multiple-source data synthesis
Your briefings may need to include information from a vast range of different sources. These include email and message chains, cloud platforms, third-party applications, and internal systems, among many others.
AI tools can accelerate the process of scanning these sources, leaving you with more time to focus on the final details of your briefing document. Workflow automation apps like Zapier, Lindy, and n8n are engineered to connect your workflows across dozens of applications.
You can, for instance, set up one of these tools to monitor your teamโs emails, messaging apps, shared document folders, Slack and Zoom channels, and more. Your AI tool will then automatically collate data from all of these connected sources, extract the most important details, and use them to create a single, comprehensive briefing.
Using a workflow automation app helps ensure that all relevant information, updates, and action points related to your teamโs responsibilities are stored in a central location. This, in turn, minimises the risk of you missing essential details from different communication and work platforms. It also makes the process of drafting team briefings much quicker, as all the necessary data will be readily available at your fingertips.
An AI briefing assistant
By embracing the new era of technology and incorporating AI tools into your team briefing workflows, you can effectively boost productivity without increasing time expenditure. The right platforms can automatically summarize meetings, generate and refine drafts, analyse and summarise data, and keep information from multiple sources in a central location for easy access.
AI apps are designed to handle the most time-consuming elements of drawing up team briefings, leaving you with more time to use your skills to refine content, personalise it for your audience, and provide the clear guidance your team needs for success.
