Workflow 005: The Meeting Agent

There's a scene in The Devil Wears Prada where the assistant whispers in her boss's ear, telling her who each person is right before she greets them.

I have that. It's an agent.

A meeting agent briefs you on who you're about to meet before every call, then handles the aftermath once it ends. Before: who this person is, how you know them, what you talked about last time, and anything new on their LinkedIn. After: a drafted follow-up email and an updated contact record. Mine runs on Claude with access to my calendar, email, LinkedIn, meeting transcripts, and contact database.

I'm writing this with a cold, going into a full day of calls. This is the workflow that makes that survivable.

What this replaces

The fifteen minutes before every meeting where you try to remember who you're talking to.

What did we discuss last time? What's going on in their life? Did they announce something? Have we emailed since? Are they a client, a friend, someone I met once at an event?

Multiply that by eight meetings and it's most of a working day spent getting ready to work.

And the version where you skip it is worse. You walk in blind, spend the first five minutes reconstructing context out loud, and the other person can tell.

Blueprint

Two halves, running at different times.

Before the meeting. Every morning, alongside the daily brief, the agent builds a profile for each person on the calendar: who they are, how we met, their role in my life or business, anything new on their LinkedIn, our email history, and what happened in our last few meetings.

After the meeting. On trigger, it pulls the transcript, drafts a follow-up email summarizing what was discussed, and updates that person's record in the contact database. At 10pm it sweeps everything I didn't trigger manually and updates those records too.

Trigger: the morning brief for the pre-read, a manual trigger for the follow-up, 10pm for the sweep. Inputs: calendar, contact database, LinkedIn, email history, meeting transcripts. Output: a briefing before, a drafted email and an updated record after.

Organize

What has to exist first:

• One contact database, with a record per person. Who they are, how you met, their role in your world
• Calendar connected, with real names on the invites
• Email connected, so the agent can read your history with that person
• LinkedIn access, so it can check for anything new
• Meeting transcripts saved somewhere it can reach

The contact database is the piece people skip. Without it, the agent has nowhere to put what it learns, and every meeting starts from scratch again. That database is the memory. The agent is just the thing that reads and writes to it.

Systematize

Two prompts, because these are two different jobs.

Pre-meeting, folded into the morning brief:

For each meeting on my calendar today, build me a short profile of the
people I'm meeting.

For each person, tell me:
- Who they are and what they do
- How we know each other and their role in my world (client, prospect,
  team, friend, first time meeting)
- What we talked about the last time, from meeting transcripts
- Anything relevant from our email history, especially open loops
- Anything new on their LinkedIn: a new role, an announcement, a post
  worth mentioning

Keep each profile to a few lines. I'm reading this on my phone before
the call. Lead with the thing I'd feel stupid not knowing.

If I've never met them before, say so plainly and tell me what you can
find instead.

Post-meeting, saved as a skill so you can trigger it by name:

I just finished a meeting with [PERSON]. Run the post-meeting process.

1. Pull the transcript of that meeting.

2. Write a follow-up email to them covering what we discussed, anything
   I committed to, anything they committed to, and the next step.
   Match my voice. Keep it short. Save it as a draft, do not send.

3. Update their record in my contact database with what changed: what we
   discussed, any new information about them or their business, and where
   things now stand.

4. Tell me anything that came up that I should follow up on separately.

If there's no transcript, say so instead of guessing what was discussed.

How to set it up

1. Build the contact database first. One record per person, even if it starts thin.
2. Connect calendar, email, LinkedIn, and wherever your transcripts live.
3. Fold the pre-meeting prompt into your existing morning brief so it arrives with everything else.
4. Save the post-meeting prompt as a skill, so you can say "run this for [person]" the moment a call ends.
5. Add a scheduled end-of-day run that sweeps whatever you forgot to trigger.

Assign

What the agent does: read, summarize, draft, and update records.

What stays human: the conversation, and the send button. It writes the follow-up. I read it and send it. Same boundary as the inbox agent, and for the same reason. A summary of what was discussed is a record of what you agreed to, and getting that wrong in writing is expensive.

There's a second human decision here, and it's the one people miss.

I don't run the post-meeting process on everything. Catching up with a friend doesn't need a summary email and a database update. A first call with a prospect does. The judgment about which relationships get the machinery stays with me, every time.

That's worth sitting with, because it's easy to automate something into weirdness. Nobody wants a follow-up email summarizing action items from a chat with their friend.

Rule of thumb from this build: automate the remembering, not the relationship.

The remembering is genuinely mechanical. Who is this, what did we say, what changed. A machine should hold that, because holding it in your head is how you end up doing fifteen minutes of homework before every call and still walking in half prepared.

What the machine can't do is the actual conversation. It can tell me someone announced a new role last week. It can't care about it.

Integrate

The pre-meeting brief doesn't arrive on its own. It comes attached to my morning brief, so I get one message at 8am with my day plus everyone in it.

The rest of the chain:

• The morning brief carries the profiles for the day's calls
• After a call, one trigger pulls the transcript, drafts the follow-up, and updates the record
• At 10pm, once meetings are done, a scheduled run sweeps everything I didn't trigger and updates the remaining records
• Those updated records are what tomorrow's briefing reads from

That last point is the part that compounds. Every meeting makes the next one better prepared, without anyone maintaining anything. The database gets richer whether I remember to feed it or not.

Tomorrow: the SOP builder. How a recording becomes a documented process.