Meetings aren’t usually the highlight of our workday. Between taking notes and making sure those "let's circle back" promises actually lead somewhere, meetings can feel like a drain on productivity. That’s why, at Cirface, we’ve turned to Fellow as our AI Meeting Assistant to help us through every stage of our meetings.

Fellow is an AI meeting assistant that does all the heavy lifting during our calls. It creates agendas, automatically records meetings and even reminds us of key points and action items to stay on track. This tool has completely changed the way we conduct our meetings at every stage, from start to finish.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how we use Fellow at every stage of our meetings, from planning and running the meeting to following up afterward, and the features that make it an essential part of our tech stack.

How Fellow AI Meeting Assistant Transforms Every Stage of Our Meetings

Before the Meeting: Preparation and Planning

Great meetings start with great preparation and Fellow takes care of every detail to set meetings up for success.

Pre-meeting AI Briefs and Meeting Templates

Fellow is the only AI meeting note taker that helps you prepare before your meetings with a gallery of 500+ meeting agenda templates to choose from and a dedicated space to plan talking points in advance. They like to say that a bad transcribed meeting is still a bad meeting, so Fellow’s agenda feature helps teams plan their meetings and discussion points so they are always a good use of time.

Another Fellow AI feature that stands out when it comes to preparation is the pre-meeting briefs that Fellow sends before a meeting, reminding you of what was discussed and decided in the previous iteration of this meeting. Thanks to Fellow, we’re always prepared when we’re about to meet internally or with Cirface clients.

Clear Purpose and Agenda Reminders

At Cirface, we’ve also adopted an Enterprise feature in Fellow called Meeting Guidelines, which is a seat of features that allows organization leaders to automate meeting policies to improve culture across the organization.

One of its most useful features from Meeting Guidelines is the Meeting Purpose Prompt which reminds you as an organizer to define clear objectives before the meeting takes place. Not only that, but Fellow also sends agenda reminders to everyone involved to contribute discussion points so that the agenda is complete.

Fellow even takes it a step further with its "no agenda, no attenda" rule. This prompt alone has saved me and my team hours of wasted time. When a meeting lacks an agenda, Fellow suggests rescheduling or cancelling. Now when there's no clear plan, Fellow helps us either quickly put together an agenda, reschedule when we're better prepared, or just handle it over email.

Attendee Management

Fellow also keeps an eye on the attendee list. If the number of participants grows beyond a set limit, Fellow flags it and prompts you to reconsider who really needs to be there. That way, you narrow down attendance to only those essential to the discussion and create an environment where everyone attending has the chance to contribute.

Even better, Fellow helps you visualize the real cost of meetings with its Meeting Cost Calculator. The calculator appears in your calendar invite and shows you the exact dollar amount based on attendees' time and salaries. Seeing the actual cost makes you think twice about who needs to be there and how long the meeting should run. When a routine check-in costs $400 per hour, it's easier to make smart decisions about attendee lists and meeting duration or whether that meeting needs to happen at all.

No-Meeting Days and Hour Limits

Fellow does not only protect your meetings, it also looks after your well-being and productivity. With No-Meeting Days, you can block off entire days to focus on work. And with Weekly Meeting Hour Limits, Fellow tracks your schedule and alerts you before meeting overload hits, which helps you stay productive and avoid burnout from back-to-back meetings.

Speedy Meetings

The Speedy Meetings feature in Fellow automatically builds in buffer time between calls by trimming 30-minute meetings to 25 minutes and hour-long sessions to 50 minutes. These small gaps prevent back-to-back meeting rush and give you time to process or prepare before your next call.

During the Meeting: Staying on Track

Meetings often move quickly, and it can be challenging to keep up while also participating meaningfully. That's where Fellow comes in and acts as your hands-on assistant during the meeting to keep you focused.

Meeting Transcription and Recording

One of Fellow's standout features and definitely a fan-favourite at Cirface is its AI Meeting Copilot. Copilot records and transcribes meetings automatically and captures every point, action item and decision in real time. This feature has greatly improved my focus during meetings, allowing me to stay fully engaged in the discussion without the distraction of note-taking or the worry of missing something important while trying to jot it all down.

Collaborative Note-Taking

But if you prefer writing your own notes, Fellow makes that easy too. The platform gives everyone on the call the flexibility to document action items or key details in their own words. Its smart and user-friendly chrome extension shows up as a handy widget on the side of your screen right within your call platform. This way you can stay focused on the conversation while jotting down notes without looking away or losing track of what’s being discussed.

Ask Copilot

Ask Copilot has to be by far the most mind-blowing feature in my humble opinion. If you miss a point or need to recall something from the discussion as it’s happening, you can simply type your question, and Copilot will scan the meeting transcript to retrieve the information you need within seconds. If you're like me and hate interrupting the flow of conversation with "Sorry, what was that deadline again?" or "Could you repeat that last point?", then Ask Copilot is your meeting lifeline.

You can also use Ask Copilot after the meeting to dig deeper or clarify details, but more on that later.

After the Meeting: Turning Discussion into Action

A meeting only becomes valuable when it leads to action and that’s where Fellow truly shines.

AI-Generated Summaries

As soon as the meeting ends, Fellow steps in and creates a concise summary of all the key points, decisions and action items. It’s not a word-for-word transcript but a focused recap that highlights what actually matters.

This AI meeting note taker then automatically emails the recap and the recording of the meeting to everyone who attended. This means then even if you missed a detail or didn’t have time to take your own notes, Fellow has you covered and aligned with your entire team on next steps.

Action Items and Integrations

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of my favourite things about Fellow is how effortlessly it handles action items and integrates them into the tools we already use. As diehard Asana users and partners, this has completely streamlined the way we work.

During a meeting, any action items you input in Fellow are instantly linked and recreated as tasks in the relevant Asana project. This eliminates the need to manually transfer your tasks or worry about someone forgetting what they’re supposed to do.

What makes this integration even better is the two-way sync, which means that If someone marks a task as complete in Asana, it’s updated in Fellow automatically and the same goes the other way around.

Ask Copilot (again!)

Fellow’s Ask Copilot is just as useful after the meeting as it is during it. If you’re revisiting a project or trying to clarify something that came up in the discussion, you can simply ask Copilot to pull the information you need.

For instance, if someone mentions ideas for a social media campaign or key messaging points, you can prompt Copilot to pull those details from the conversation. Copilot can then help you organise that input into actionable steps, like designing social media graphics or drafting launch email content, and even suggest deadlines or dependencies.

You can take it one step further and ask Copilot to help you draft a project brief that you with your team. I found that Copilot gets more useful once you learn how to ask the right questions. Lately, I've been refining my prompts to get even more granular. Instead of basic questions like "What did we discuss?" I've learned to get specific, "Show me all budget concerns from our Q1 planning" or "List every task needed to push our new campaign forward." The more detailed my prompts got, the better Copilot delivered.

Meeting analytics

Finally, nothing drives improvement quite like numbers. Fellow’s built-in analytics offer detailed insights that make it easier to understand and improve your meeting habits. It tracks key metrics like how many of your meetings have agendas, how much time your team spends in meetings vs focus work and overall calendar hygiene.

These numbers help you spot patterns you might not otherwise notice so you can uncover inefficiencies and address them directly. Moreover, what I find really helpful is how flexible and detailed the dashboard is. You can filter by time, specific teams, or even individual contributors to see exactly where adjustments are needed and keep your team accountable

Security and Compliance

Meetings can contain a lot of confidential information for organizations. Fellow is trusted by enterprise, publicly traded organizations as the most secure and accurate AI meeting note taker:

Administrators in Fellow get unique controls to manage secure access and Compliance
Fellow syncs with your HRIS to make provisioning and de-provisioning automatic
Fellow is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and GDPR ready

This is how my team and I at Cirface use Fellow as our AI Meeting Assistant. It's brought focus to our meetings and clarity to our follow-ups so we can focus on actual work. If your meetings need structure and your team needs clarity on who's doing what, Fellow might just be the assistant you didn’t know you needed. Get 10% off your first year of Fellow with our discount code.

Fellow Review: The Best AI Meeting Assistant for Internal and External Meetings