How to Have AI Brief You Before Every Meeting

You open your calendar and remember nothing about the meeting. Ten minutes tonight buys you a week of walking into meetings already knowing who’s in the room and what to ask.

1. Connect your calendar to an AI assistant you already use

ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot all let you connect Google Calendar or Outlook now, usually under Settings, Connectors, or Apps. It takes about two minutes and no coding. Once connected, the assistant reads your real calendar instead of you copying events in by hand.

2. Write one prompt and save it

Something like: ‘Look at tomorrow’s calendar. For each meeting, tell me who’s likely attending based on the title and invitees, what it’s probably about, and one question I should walk in ready to ask.’ Save this prompt somewhere you’ll reuse it, a notes app is fine.

3. Turn it into a scheduled task

ChatGPT and Claude both now have a ‘scheduled tasks’ or ‘tasks’ feature in settings, where you pick a prompt and a time it runs automatically, no app to open. Set it for 6pm, so the brief for tomorrow is waiting when you check your phone that evening.

4. Ask for the one line you actually need

Don’t let it write an essay per meeting. Ask specifically for one opening question or one thing to remember about each person, so the whole brief fits on one screen. That is the part you will actually read at 6pm.

5. Read it once, then let it go

The point isn’t to study it. Skim it once before you close your laptop for the day, so it sits in the back of your mind, and you walk in tomorrow already oriented instead of catching up live in the room.

A worked example

A reader with three back to back meetings on a Wednesday, none of which she remembered agreeing to by Tuesday evening.

Three ways to bend it

For interview prep

If you’re job hunting, run the same prompt against interview invites instead of meetings, and ask it to also pull the interviewer’s likely role from the email signature or invite, so you know who’s actually across the table.

For managers doing 1:1s

Ask it to pull your last written notes or messages with that person instead of just the calendar title, so the brief includes what you promised them last time, not just their name and slot.

For a team sharing one calendar

If you manage a small team’s shared calendar, point the same setup at it each morning and ask for a single line per person: who’s meeting whom, and what’s likely at stake.

When it goes wrong

It says it can’t access my calendar.

The connector needs a one time permission grant, usually a pop up asking you to log into Google or Microsoft again. If it still fails, check whether it’s a work calendar your company has locked down rather than your personal one.

The brief is too generic to be useful.

That usually means your meeting titles are vague, like ‘Sync’ or ‘Catch up’. Add the other person’s name or a two word topic to the invite itself when you create it, and the briefs get sharply better.

It arrives at a bad time or not at all.

Scheduled tasks can quietly stop firing if you haven’t opened the app in a while. Check the task is still listed as active roughly once a week, and adjust the time if 6pm doesn’t fit your evening.

When not to use this

Skip this if most of your meetings are the same five people every week doing the same standup, there’s nothing new to brief. And think twice if your calendar holds genuinely confidential deal names or personal details you wouldn’t want passing through a third party’s servers, in that case a private note to yourself the night before does the same job with none of the risk.

What you can now do

You stop walking into meetings cold, without spending a single extra minute doing prep work by hand.

Part of Making Life Easier With AI, a weekly walk-through of one small thing AI can take off your plate.

Act as a blunt hiring manager who has read ten thousand resumes, not a career coach. I will paste my full resume and the job description I want. Rewrite the whole resume for that role, section by section, in this order: summary, experience, skills, education. Rules: every experience line leads with impact, not duty. Use bracketed placeholders like [8 percent] for any number I did not give you, and list at the end every placeholder I need to replace with a real figure. Keep it to one page of text. Plain formatting only, no tables or columns, so screening software can parse it. After the rewrite, tell me the three weakest claims that need evidence before I send this anywhere. My resume: [paste resume]. The role: [paste job description].