From Google Meet to your ChatGPT settings, the AI tools already sitting in your daily workflow just got more useful. Here’s what to try…
Google Meet now tells you what was decided
Google Meet’s ‘take notes for me’ feature has a new Decisions section that tracks meeting outcomes with a status label (aligned, needs further discussion, disagreed or shelved) instead of just summarising what was said.
If you’ve ever come out of a meeting your executive missed and had to reconstruct what was resolved from a wall of notes, this does that work for you. You can also now toggle which sections appear (summary, decisions, next steps, details) on a per-meeting basis. So, a quick catch-up call doesn’t generate the same lengthy notes as a full planning session.
Google Docs can now chase down your comment threads
If you manage documents that go back and forth between multiple stakeholders, Google Docs’ Gemini integration can now summarise entire comment threads, pull out exactly which issues are still unresolved and draft replies to open comments using context from files already in Drive.
It can even suggest edits based on reviewer feedback for you to approve with one click. For anyone who’s opened a shared doc to find forty scattered comments from six people, this is the closest thing to having someone triage it for you first.
Microsoft has built its most capable personal assistant yet
Microsoft’s new Scout assistant goes further than Copilot. It works across Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint. Plus it can handle calendar management, expense reports and email drafting. And, notably, it’ll call you rather than just chat.
It’s currently in limited preview for Microsoft’s early-access customers but worth watching if your organisation runs on Microsoft 365. This is a big step toward an AI agent handling the kind of coordination work that currently sits with EAs.
ChatGPT now has a mode for handling sensitive information
OpenAI’s new lockdown mode restricts what ChatGPT can do (no live web browsing, no file downloads, no external connections). This is in exchange for much stronger protection against a growing attack method called prompt injection, where malicious instructions are hidden inside a document or webpage the AI processes.
It’s not something most people need to switch on but if you’re using AI tools with confidential executive or board material, it’s worth knowing the option exists.
Free, private dictation, without the subscription
Google’s AI Edge Eloquent app, now available on Mac, transcribes and cleans up dictation entirely on your device. Mo cloud, no subscription – and it lets you add custom words, so it stops mangling names and industry terms. If you’ve been paying for a transcription tool, this is worth a look – though it’s Mac-only for now.
