I recently came across an interesting AI prompt that I’ll likely start using every Friday as I look forward to the week ahead.
David Cummings recently posted about some new AI use cases and they were all very insightful, but one I’ll be using a lot. He said:
Preparing for a Board Meeting
Last week, I attended a board meeting with 30 other board members. Prior to the meeting, we received a PDF containing the board agenda, a list of attendees, and governance items. I uploaded this PDF to ChatGPT and Grok, asking each tool to extract all the names and companies listed, then search the web for two to three news items or recent events about each person or company. Within a couple of minutes, they generated a bullet-point list of all the attendees, their companies, and relevant recent news. As a result, I entered the board meeting much better prepared, with a variety of topics to discuss during our dinner session.
I tried it for an upcoming meeting and the results were amazing!
I used this prompt: “Here is a list of people attending a meeting with me in a few days. Look at their names and companies and find any news items or recent events for each person or company.“
Below that, I simply pasted the list of people attending, copied directly out of my calendar. It was an ugly looking list, like this:
to: “[email protected]” <[email protected]>, Ron Jones <[email protected]>, “Johnson, Steven A.” <[email protected]> … (with a bunch more)
It had perhaps 20 names in the list, each with the formatting slightly different, and it parsed through and gave me a great list. For example, one person attending the meeting is with the Credit Union of Georgia, and it pulled this based solely on her email address (as part of the larger list that ChatGPT provided):
16 of the attendees had info similar to that, and there were just four that it couldn’t find any info for (and those were just free email accounts like “[email protected]”).
Do this weekly?
Now I’m considering doing this weekly as part of my weekly preview. I looked ahead at next week and gave it five names and email addresses of people I’d be meeting with, and it gave a great list of insights with links to details on the stories that mattered for each organization.
It’s imperfect, for sure, and the output should always be verified since AI models are known for sometimes making things up, but it’s a great start. If I see an interesting item about someone I’ll be seeing soon, I can click the link to verify and learn more.
Give it a try for yourself. Head over to ChatGPT (or the AI tool you prefer) and try that prompt with a few names and emails and see what happens.
