The ability to capture, organize, and search project meeting content for project coordination sessions, OAC meetings, and design reviews is known as meeting intelligence. With this capability, notes from meetings are recorded, along with decisions and discussions from the meetings. This helps ensure that project content is captured and linked to the rest of the project file, rather than being recorded in notes that are filed away in someone’s desk.
The description of project meeting minutes is generally brief and may not capture the rationale and context behind decisions regarding drawings or RFIs. An entry found in meeting minutes several months later that states, “duct rerouted per structural conflict, resolved,” does not capture enough of the information surrounding the rationale for the resolution, and does not describe which drawing or other options that may have been discussed.
Meeting intelligence makes meeting content searchable and linked with other project record content. In the project context, meeting records are frequently lengthy, and details can be lost. A search of meeting records for discussions of the mechanical room clearance issue can yield a relevant record, rather than requiring a search through each meeting’s lengthy record to determine which records pertain to this issue.
iFieldSmart’s Meeting AI capability is built around exactly this gap, aiming to turn project meeting content into searchable coordination memory rather than static documents that get filed and rarely reopened, which matters most on longer projects where staff turnover means the people attending meetings in month fourteen weren’t necessarily present for decisions made in month three.
A better way to measure if meeting intelligence actually adds value on a project: go back several months and find a decision. Easily find the why and what other things this decision is connected to. If this takes a couple of minutes, the tool is working as it should. If it still takes a truckload of digging, the meetings may not be establishing the documentation principles, or perhaps any principles at all. Once these are in order, the tool can be an excellent source of value for the organization.
Voice-to-text and automated transcription technology has made real-time capture of meeting content considerably more feasible than it used to be, though raw transcription alone isn’t quite the same as genuine meeting intelligence; a full transcript still needs structure and connection to the project’s other records to become genuinely useful later, rather than simply being a longer, less curated version of the same retrieval problem traditional minutes already had.
