AI meeting notes: keep the full transcript and protect the data

This guide is for foreign employees in Korean companies, especially in management support, legal, accounting and HR, who use AI tools to take meeting notes. The rule is simple: keep the full transcript, rework it with a clear prompt, and keep confidential data out of free AI services. Tool features and terms below are as of October 23, 2026.

What AI meeting tools do, and where they fall short

AI note-takers are now common for internal and external meetings. Well-known services include Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai and Naver's Clova Note (클로바노트). They transcribe speech and write summaries, and some, such as Fireflies, also identify different speakers. Participants can focus on the discussion instead of taking notes and can read the results right after the meeting.

The weak point is the automatic summary. Important details can drop out, and context can be lost:

• In a legal team's meeting on contract terms, subtle nuances or conditional agreements may not make it into the summary, which can cause problems later.
• In an HR interview record, a candidate's non-verbal signals and the atmosphere of the interview are lost when speech becomes text.

Keep the full transcript

Besides a summary, these services give you the transcript itself. Otter and Fireflies transcribe each meeting, and Clova Note lets you download the recorded audio, the transcript and your memos as files. The transcript records the whole conversation in time order, so you can check anything the summary left out.

Take a budget review meeting in an accounting team. The AI summary may show only the final decision. The transcript shows how the team got there: the discussion, objections and conditional approvals. These details help later when someone needs to understand why a decision was made, or when you prepare for an audit.

Reworking the transcript with a long-context model

Once you have the transcript, you can ask a large language model to reorganize it. The original version of this advice used Google AI Studio, Google's platform for trying its Gemini models. Two points have changed:

• The Gemini 1.5 Pro model named in older guides was shut down on September 29, 2025. Current models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro accept up to 1,048,576 input tokens, which is enough for the transcript of a long meeting.
• Google AI Studio and the free tier of the Gemini API cost nothing within usage limits. On these unpaid services, however, Google uses what you submit to improve its products, and human reviewers may read it. Google's terms say not to submit sensitive, confidential or personal information. On paid services, for example through a Google Cloud project with active billing or a Workspace enterprise account, Google does not use your prompts and responses to improve its products.

So the free version suits only material you could show outside the company. For anything else, use a paid or enterprise service that your company has approved.

Writing the prompt

A clear prompt does most of the work. Set the goal first, then list the instructions, then give the material.

• Goal. For example: "Turn this interview transcript into an evaluation summary for each candidate."
• Instructions. For HR interviews, ask for core competencies, career history, the answer to each question, and the interviewer's follow-up questions with the candidate's responses.
• Limits. Tell the AI not to add anything that is not in the transcript. A point nobody made can cause serious trouble if it appears in official minutes.
• Format. Ask for a table you can paste into Google Sheets or Excel, or for paragraphs ready for a report.

Two examples of what this can produce:

• A legal team records a contract negotiation, then asks for each clause to be sorted into agreed points, open points and items for further review, with each side's position in time order. The result shows the whole negotiation at a glance.
• An accounting team uses the transcript of a quarterly review to document each department's budget spending, the reasons for overspending or underspending and next quarter's adjustments, with the background behind each figure.

Match the output to the document

Support teams often use Word files for internal review drafts, PDF for final versions shared outside, and files from the Hangul (한글) word processor for documents sent to public agencies. The Korean government is moving its own systems from the older .hwp format to the open .hwpx format. Central ministries already require .hwpx in their On-Nara (온나라) document system, local governments were set to follow from May 18, 2026, and the government planned to restrict .hwp attachments in official mail from October 2026. Ask the agency which format it accepts.

Name the target format in your prompt. Board materials need short key points that fit on slides. Audit files need a detailed, time-ordered record with the evidence. You can also ask the AI to follow your team's own templates, such as a legal review opinion or an interview evaluation sheet.

Protect confidential information

Meeting transcripts often contain personnel matters, financial figures and legal issues. Before you upload one:

• remove or generalize confidential details;
• mask personal information and trade secrets, or replace names with code names;
• check whether your company offers an on-premises AI system or an enterprise version with stronger security.

Information you want to protect as a trade secret also needs real secrecy measures inside the company. See A security pledge alone does not make information a trade secret in Korea.

Checklist

Once the method works for you, share it with your team. File minutes by project, topic and attendee so that past discussions are easy to find, and for recurring meetings check the previous minutes to follow progress and spot unfinished tasks. AI is a tool; checking the minutes and deciding what they mean is still your job.

1. Save the full transcript, not only the AI summary.
2. Remove or mask personal data and confidential details before uploading.
3. Use a paid or company-approved AI service for anything sensitive.
4. Write the prompt in three parts (goal, instructions, material) and forbid additions.
5. Name the output format of the final document.
6. Tag minutes by project, topic and attendee, and track open tasks from meeting to meeting.