# Structured Extraction from Meeting Notes

Real meeting notes are messy. People talk over each other, topics jump around, decisions are made implicitly, and half the context exists only in people's heads. AI needs careful prompting to make sense of this.

Technique: Chain-of-Thought Extraction

The key insight: instead of asking AI to produce an action plan directly, ask it to reason through the notes step by step.

Bad Prompt ` Turn these meeting notes into action items: [paste notes]

Good Prompt ` You are a senior project manager reviewing the following raw meeting notes. Process them step by step:

STEP 1: Read through the notes and identify every topic that was discussed. List them.

STEP 2: For each topic, determine whether it resulted in: (a) A DECISION — something was agreed upon (b) An ACTION — something needs to be done (c) An OPEN QUESTION — something needs further discussion or research (d) INFORMATION ONLY — shared for awareness, no follow-up needed