How does AI minutes drafting handle our board's information?

BoardTools can prepare a first draft of a meeting's minutes from the record your board already created — the agenda, the notes and decisions captured during the meeting, and the motions and votes you recorded. This page explains exactly what that involves, because "we used AI" is not something a board should have to take on trust.

How to ask for a draft

Open the meeting, go to its Minutes tab, and look for the First draft with AI panel above the minutes themselves. Press Draft with AI; a confirmation says exactly what will be sent before anything happens, and Request a draft starts it.

A few things decide whether you see that panel at all:

• The minutes must still be a draft. Once minutes are approved and locked, they are the board's adopted record and are never re-drafted — reopen them for correction first.
• You need permission to take minutes. Anyone who can edit the minutes can ask for a draft; members who can only read them cannot. See Who can do what?.
• Your administrator must have configured it. With no model provider set up, the feature isn't there for anyone — see Turning it off.

Drafting happens in the background, so the panel reports where the request has got to — Queued, Drafting…, Draft ready for review, Retrying, or Needs attention. It usually takes a few minutes. Asking twice while a draft is already on its way doesn't start a second one.

You don't have to sit there reloading. While a draft is queued or being written, the panel updates itself — leave the page open and it will tell you when the draft is ready. It stops checking as soon as the answer is final, and pauses entirely while the browser tab is in the background, so a tab left open overnight isn't quietly working. Check for the draft is still there if you'd rather ask right now, and reloading the page always shows the current state.

What the assistant is given

When someone on your board asks for a draft, we send this meeting's own record to the model:

• the meeting title, type, date, time and location;
• who attended (names and their recorded present/absent/remote status) and whether quorum was met;
• the agenda — item titles, types, presenters and descriptions;
• the notes and decisions captured against each item during the meeting;
• each motion: its text, who moved and seconded it, and its recorded result and vote tally;
• a meeting transcript, if your board has one for that meeting.
• a short description of your board's minutes style (heading order and wording, how attendance and motions are laid out) and the headings of your usual agenda — see Drafts follow your board's own format.

What is never sent

• Anything belonging to another board. Your board's information is walled off at the database level, and the step that builds the request can only ever see one board's data.
• Your documents and packets. Files are never uploaded to the model.
• Contact details. Only display names are included — never email addresses or phone numbers.
• Your meeting join link. It is stripped down to the platform name before anything is sent.

Who provides the model, and do they train on our minutes?

Drafting uses the Anthropic Claude API. Anthropic does not train its models on API customer data by default, and BoardTools does not enable any data-sharing option or route your information through any consumer AI product.

Your minutes are stored where they always were — in your board's own record inside BoardTools. We keep no separate copy of what was sent to the model.

The facts come from your records, not from the model

The parts of minutes that a board can be held to are never left to the assistant:

• Motions, movers, seconders and results are rewritten from your recorded votes after the draft comes back. If the model describes a motion as carried when your tally says otherwise, your record wins — every time.
• Attendance and quorum are taken from the attendance you recorded and the quorum rule in your settings.
• Invented content is removed. A motion the model made up is dropped, and a note it filed against an item that is not on your agenda is moved into the general notes rather than attached to the wrong item.

The assistant is also instructed never to add background, opinion, characterisations of individuals, or anything it was not given.

Drafts follow your board's own format

Every board writes minutes its own way, so the draft is laid out the way your minutes already are rather than in a generic template. BoardTools looks, in this order, at:

1. Your most recently approved minutes — the best evidence of your house style, because the board adopted exactly that text. Minutes from a meeting of the same type (for example, a committee's own minutes for a committee meeting) are preferred.
2. The agenda template of the meeting's series, if the meeting was scheduled from a recurring series that uses one — it gives your standard agenda headings.
3. A standard layout, for a board with no approved minutes yet: plain headings in the order Attendance, Other business, Motions, Decisions, Action items; attendance as "Present: …" and "Absent: …" lines; and each motion as "Title — Result; moved by …; seconded by …; vote" with its text beneath.

From your approved minutes it picks up the order and wording of the general section headings (for example "Members present" or "Resolutions"), whether headings are in capitals, whether attendance is a list, a table or a single line, how movers and seconders are named (in a sentence, on "Mover:" / "Seconder:" lines, or as "(Smith/Jones)"), and whether motion text is quoted or set out as a "RESOLVED" clause. Only the style is used — the wording of your earlier minutes is never sent to the model.

Formatting never changes substance: the text of every motion and its recorded vote are copied from your records word for word, whatever the layout. They are never paraphrased by the assistant.

What you will see

• Generated text appears in your Draft minutes, one block per agenda item plus a general block with the attendance roll, decisions, action items and motions.
• Every generated block is marked as imported until someone edits it, so a reviewer can see at a glance what came from the assistant and what a person wrote.
• The general block opens with a line saying the draft was prepared by the assistant and still needs review — so the provenance survives even in a printed copy.
• The request is recorded in your audit log (who asked, when, and which model) — with counts only, never the content of your minutes.

If something goes wrong

If the model times out, is unavailable, declines, or returns something unusable, your existing minutes are left exactly as they were and the request is retried automatically a few times. If it still can't complete, the request stops and reports that it needs attention — nothing is half-written into your record.

If a meeting has no captured notes, no recorded motions and no transcript, we won't draft anything at all: an agenda describes what you planned to discuss, not what happened, and writing minutes from it would be inventing a meeting.

Turning it off

AI drafting is off unless your platform administrator has configured it, and even then nothing is generated in the background — a person has to ask, for each meeting. Minutes you take by hand work exactly as they always have.

If your board would rather not use it at all, simply don't ask for a draft; ask your BoardTools administrator if you want it disabled for the whole board.

Related

• How do I record, approve, and publish minutes?
• How do I find a past decision?