Agencies run on meetings. Client calls, internal standups, creative reviews, project kickoffs. The average agency team member spends 10-15 hours per week in meetings. And most of the value from those meetings (decisions, action items, context) gets lost because nobody writes good enough notes.
AI meeting tools solve this. They record, transcribe, and summarise automatically. Your team walks out of a meeting with structured notes, action items, and searchable transcripts. No manual note-taking required. This feeds directly into AI-assisted scoping and briefing, where call transcripts become structured project briefs in minutes.
Here are the tools worth considering.
The top options
Otter.ai is the most established option for agencies. It integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. Transcription quality is strong. The summary feature extracts action items and key points automatically. The search function lets you find specific moments across all your recorded meetings. Pricing starts at around £13/month per user.
Fireflies.ai is a strong alternative, particularly for teams that want more automation. It can send meeting summaries directly to your project management tool (Asana, Monday, Notion) and CRM. The AI analysis features are slightly more advanced, identifying sentiment and topic changes during the call. Similar pricing to Otter.
Zoom’s built-in AI Companion is worth noting if your agency already uses Zoom. The transcription and summary features are now included with paid Zoom plans. Quality has improved significantly. If you are already paying for Zoom, test this before adding another tool.
Google Meet transcription is available on Google Workspace Business Standard and above. Less feature-rich than dedicated tools, but if your agency lives in Google Workspace, it is seamless.
What to look for
Transcription accuracy. All of these tools struggle with heavy accents, multiple speakers talking simultaneously, and industry jargon. Test with your actual meetings before committing.
Summary quality. The real value is not the transcript. It is the summary: key points, decisions, and action items extracted automatically. Test how well each tool identifies the signal from the noise in your typical meetings.
Integration with your workflow. A summary is useless if it sits in a tool nobody checks. The best meeting tools push summaries into Slack, email, or your project management tool automatically.
Security and client confidentiality. You are recording client conversations. Make sure the tool’s data handling, storage, and privacy policies meet your clients’ expectations. Some clients in regulated industries may not consent to AI recording. Your AI governance framework should cover this explicitly.
How agencies use them well
The most effective pattern we see:
- Record every client call. With permission, obviously. The recording becomes a searchable reference that anyone on the team can access.
- Share summaries immediately. The AI summary goes to the project channel within minutes of the call ending. No waiting for someone to write up notes.
- Extract action items into your PM tool. Decisions and tasks go directly into Asana, Monday, or whatever you use. Nothing falls through the cracks.
- Review transcripts for proposals. When writing a proposal for an existing client, search their meeting history for pain points, priorities, and language they use. This is gold for tailoring your pitch.
The tool to skip
Standalone AI note-taking apps that require you to paste in a transcript manually. If it does not join the meeting automatically and do the work without human intervention, it is adding a step rather than removing one. The whole point is that it works silently in the background.
This is part of Tool Drop, a series reviewing AI tools and approaches through an agency lens. Subscribe to the newsletter to get new articles weekly.
