How I Prepare for a Meeting in Ten Minutes With AI

I used to prepare for meetings by reading. The company website, the LinkedIn profiles, the last email thread. Forty minutes of reading, and I'd walk in knowing a lot and having decided nothing.

The meeting would go fine. Then I'd hang up and realise I never asked the one thing I actually needed to know.

That's the problem with how most people use AI for meeting prep, too. They ask for a summary. "Tell me about this company." What comes back is a tidy paragraph of things you could have read yourself, and it has the same flaw as my forty minutes of reading: it's information, not preparation.

Preparation is knowing what you want out of the room. So that's what I prompt for now.

What a meeting actually needs from you

Every meeting I've had that went badly went badly for one of three reasons. I didn't know what decision we were there to make. I didn't ask the question that would have changed my answer. Or I said something that closed a door I didn't know was open.

None of those get fixed by knowing more about the other company. They get fixed by thinking about the conversation before it happens. AI is surprisingly good at that, if you stop asking it to research and start asking it to rehearse.

The ten-minute prep prompt

I paste in whatever I have. The email that set up the call, my notes from last time, the brief if there is one. Then:

I have a meeting in the next hour. Context is below. Don't summarise the context back to me. Instead, give me: 1. The decision. In one sentence, what is this meeting actually for? What should be different when it ends? If the context doesn't make it clear, say so — that's the first thing I need to fix. 2. Three questions I should ask, ranked by how much the answer would change what I do next. For each, one line on why it matters. 3. Two things I should avoid saying, based on what's in the context: commitments I'm not ready to make, assumptions they might not share, topics that could derail it. 4. The likely objection, and the honest answer to it. Keep it short enough to read on my phone in the lift. Context: [paste]

The last line matters more than it looks. Without a length constraint you get a briefing document. With it, you get something you'll actually read two minutes before the call.

What comes back

The most useful part, almost every time, is number one. Roughly half my meetings fail the "what is this for" test. The context is a friendly email that says "let's catch up about the project", and when the model tries to name the decision, it can't.

That's not a failure of the prompt. That's the prompt doing its job. If it can't tell what the meeting is for, the other person probably can't either, and that's a five-minute fix I'd much rather make before the call than discover twenty minutes in.

The questions are the second most useful part. They're rarely brilliant. But they're ranked, and the ranking forces me to notice which question actually matters. Usually it's the boring one. "Who else needs to approve this?" has saved me more wasted weeks than any clever strategic question.

The version for calls where money is involved

When the meeting is a negotiation, a pitch, or a pricing conversation, I add a block:

Also: - What's the minimum outcome I'd be happy with, given the context? And what's the walk-away point? - What do they probably want that they haven't said? - Write the one sentence I should say if they push on price, in my voice — direct, no apology.

That last request is the one I use most. I'm bad at talking about money out loud. Having one sentence written in advance, that I've read three times, means I say it instead of mumbling a discount I didn't need to give.

If you have a similar weak spot, a phrase you always fumble, this is the place to pre-write it. I wrote more about the same instinct for emails in how I write the client email I've been avoiding.

Afterwards: the two-minute debrief

Preparation is half of it. The other half is the five minutes after the call, while it's still fresh. I used to skip this entirely. Now I dictate a messy voice note and run it through this:

Here are my raw notes from a meeting that just ended. Pull out: what was decided, who owns each next step, any date mentioned, and anything that was left vague that I should pin down by email today. Then draft a short follow-up email confirming the decisions and next steps. Plain, friendly, no recap of things we both already know. Notes: [paste]

"Anything that was left vague" is the line that earns its keep. Meetings produce a lot of agreement that turns out not to be agreement. The follow-up email is where you find out, while it's still cheap.

What to tweak

If the prep comes back generic, the context was too thin. Paste more: the actual email thread, not your summary of it. The model picks up tone, hesitation and hints from real wording that disappear when you paraphrase.

If the questions feel obvious, ask for the uncomfortable version: "Now give me the question I'm avoiding asking." There's usually one, and it's usually the important one.

And if you prep for the same kind of meeting every week — a client check-in, a weekly sync, an investor update — don't rewrite this each time. Save it once with your own tweaks and reuse it. Mine lives in Super Prompts next to the debrief prompt, so the whole meeting loop is two clicks.

One thing to try this week

Pick the next meeting on your calendar. Before you read anything about it, run the prep prompt on whatever context you already have and look only at question one: what is this meeting for?

If the answer is fuzzy, send a one-line email asking. You'll walk into a better meeting, and you'll have spent less than ten minutes getting there.

Keep your prep and debrief prompts where you'll actually use them — Super Prompts is free to start.