My Grind: Drowning in Meeting Recaps
Last quarter, our CEO kicked off a new initiative that meant an immediate spike in cross-functional meetings. Suddenly, my workload as an executive assistant exploded. I wasn’t just managing one executive’s calendar anymore; I was coordinating three, each with their own set of priorities, requiring daily syncs across departments. The sheer volume of Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls was overwhelming. My primary task became synthesizing endless meeting notes, extracting action items, identifying key decisions, and then disseminating that information to the right stakeholders — often within hours of the call ending.
It’s not just about typing fast. It’s about paying close attention, understanding context, and then distilling complex discussions into digestible summaries. Doing this manually for five to seven meetings a day, each lasting an hour, meant I was spending more time documenting than actually assisting. I’d often miss important nuances or misattribute an action item in my haste, leading to confusion and follow-up emails that ate up even more time. I needed a better way to manage the information deluge, a solution that could genuinely help with the relentless pace of executive communication. This is precisely where I started looking for the best AI tools for executive assistants, not for hype, but for practical, production-ready help.
The Meeting Note Taker Review: Fathom.video and What It Got Right
I’ve tried a few AI meeting tools over the past couple of years, and honestly, many of them felt like glorified transcription services with a fancy wrapper. They’d give you a transcript, sure, but the summaries were often generic, and extracting actionable insights still required a manual deep-read. That’s not what I needed. I needed something that understood the *point* of the meeting.
After testing a handful, I settled on Fathom.video. It isn’t perfect, nothing is, but it gets the job done better than anything else I’ve used. My concrete love for Fathom is its ability to pull out action items and key moments with speaker attribution. That’s a lifesaver. Instead of sifting through pages of text, I get a concise list of who needs to do what, by when, directly linked to the exact moment in the recording. This feature alone saves me at least an hour a day, sometimes more, reducing the post-meeting scramble to a quick review and polish.
The transcription quality is also top-tier, which is critical for accurate summaries. I’ve found it handles various accents reasonably well, though if you’re dealing with very thick or unusual speech patterns, a quick skim-and-edit is still necessary for compliance. That’s my main gripe: no transcription service is 100% accurate, and relying solely on AI without a human check feels risky, especially for sensitive executive discussions. But compared to transcribing from scratch, it’s a minor annoyance. For a comprehensive ai meeting tool, it’s a solid contender.
As for pricing, Fathom.video offers a free tier that’s surprisingly capable for solo work or light usage. For a team of execs, where you’re recording multiple meetings daily and need the full suite of features, the Team plan at $29/month per user is fair. Considering the hours it saves and the accuracy it brings to critical communications, it pays for itself almost immediately. It’s one of the few tools I’d actually pay for without hesitation.
Beyond Meetings: Automating the Mundane with Bardeen
Meetings are just one part of an EA’s job, albeit a huge one. There’s also the constant flow of information, data entry, report generation, and coordinating across different platforms. This is where general automation tools come into play, and I’ve found Bardeen to be incredibly useful for connecting disparate apps and automating repetitive tasks.
My concrete love for Bardeen comes from a specific playbook I built. Our sales team frequently sends emails with new lead data, and I used to manually copy-paste details from these emails into our Coda pipeline tracker. It was mind-numbing work and prone to errors. With Bardeen, I set up an automation that watches for specific subject lines from our sales team. When an email hits my inbox, Bardeen automatically extracts the client name, project details, and contact info, then populates a new line in our Coda table. It’s simple, but it saves me an hour every week, time I can now spend on higher-value tasks like research or strategic planning.
I’ve also experimented with more ambitious ‘agent’ platforms like Lindy, hoping for a truly autonomous assistant that could handle complex tasks. My experience, however, has been underwhelming. Lindy, while promising conceptually, often requires too much hand-holding and explicit instruction for the dynamic, context-heavy situations an EA faces daily. It’s not truly autonomous; it’s another inbox, another set of prompts to refine, and sometimes, it’s just plain wrong. It feels like a co-pilot that needs constant supervision rather than an independent operator. For sensitive data, any automation needs strict guardrails, and Bardeen’s explicit permissions and transparent actions make it easier to audit than a black-box ‘agent’ that might make decisions without clear oversight.