I was drowning in transcript summaries that were just shorter transcripts. "The team discussed X. Then they discussed Y." No signal.
I switched to a prompt that extracts only three things and forces an explicit owner and date for every action, marking anything unassigned as a risk. The "unowned action = flagged risk" rule surfaced all the stuff that quietly falls through the cracks.
How do you handle it when the transcript genuinely never assigned an owner?
From the meeting transcript below, extract ONLY three sections. Ignore everything else (chit-chat, tangents, thinking-out-loud). DECISIONS: bullet each concrete decision that was actually made (not proposed). If it was only discussed without resolution, it is NOT a decision, put it under Open Questions. ACTION ITEMS: table with columns Owner | Action | Due. Every action MUST have a named owner and a date. If the transcript didn't assign an owner or date, still list the action but put '(UNASSIGNED)' / '(NO DATE)' and add it to a 'Risks' note at the bottom, because unowned actions don't happen. OPEN QUESTIONS: things raised but not resolved, phrased as questions. Rules: attribute owners only to people who actually agreed to it in the transcript; never guess who should own something. Quote nothing verbatim, synthesize. If a section is empty, write 'None'.
The unowned-action-as-risk framing is the whole value. In practice the 'Risks' list at the bottom is the part my manager reads first, because it's exactly the set of things that will silently not happen. We started ending meetings by resolving that list live.