There are three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and unfortunately, meetings. Now, agents can’t help you with the first two, at least definitely not with the first one. Yet. Sort of. To be honest, I don’t know at this point. But agents can definitely make sure you come to every meeting prepared by doing the prep work for you. Let’s build a meeting prep agent.
The key to building this agent is to walk it through how we want to be prepared in one conversation, then have it memorize those steps using a skill. Once it knows what we want it to do, we can set it up so it runs automatically before each of our meetings.
So if we want this agent to replicate our process, we have to give it access to the same tools we have. I’m going to put myself in the shoes of a customer-facing role, so let’s add in Salesforce so I can get the full picture of recent interactions with the prospect, Apollo, an enrichment tool so I can get a better understanding of who I’m speaking to, and then some of the basics: Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack. Now on your end, you can add as many tools as you’d like that you use before every one of your meetings.
Now it’s time to start walking this agent through how we’d like to be prepared. My next meeting is with Emily at Torchlight, and how I would usually start is by going into Salesforce. Frankly, not something I want to do, so let’s ask the agent to do that for me. “Get me recent interactions with Emily at Torchlight from our CRM,” and the agent will grab those for me.
Next, I try to figure out who Emily is on LinkedIn, so let’s ask the agent to grab Apollo for some background information. Just like that, it’s going to figure out work experience and additional information. And finally, “Scour the sales channel for any mention of Torchlight in the last week.”
Now the agent has everything I usually get, so let’s ask it, “Send me a beautiful HTML email with all of this information.” And just like that, in my inbox, I get this perfect preparation email. Your process might be different. That’s totally okay. What’s important is that you walk your agent through what your usual process is.
Now, remember, agents have no memory across conversations. If I open up a new chat and say, “Prepare me for my meeting with Emily at Torchlight,” this agent does not remember what we just did. The agent is going to try to figure it out, but it won’t do my process exactly, because I haven’t encoded that process. I haven’t written it down anywhere.
So back to our previous chat, this agent has in its context, in the conversation so far, the steps I wanted to do. So here I can ask it, “Build a skill from this.” Skills are reusable instructions that agents can read and understand what to do. It’s taken the steps we followed so far and written out a step-by-step guide they can reference in the future.
So now if I open a new chat and say, “Prepare me for my meeting with Jeff at Torchlight,” the agent is going to first read its skill to understand what it needs to do, and then execute all of the steps it’s documented in that skill. The skill is how we make sure the agent prepares me the way I like to be prepared.
Final step here, we obviously don’t want to prompt the agent every time we have a meeting. We want this agent to wake up before our meeting, look at who we’re meeting with, then execute the steps from the skill. To do that, well, we can just ask the agent, “Can you prepare me 15 minutes before every meeting on my calendar?”
The agent is going to set up a trigger. It’s going to wake up 15 minutes before each of our meetings, send itself a prompt with all of the information from that meeting, and execute our meeting prep for us.
And just like that, we have a meeting prep agent. We get an email with all of the information pulled for us, the way we want to be prepared, 15 minutes before each of our meetings. Now this is one example. There are so many ways to do this differently, and I’m going to include in the description some templates you can start from based on your role. Now that we’ve solved meeting prep, we’ll cover death and taxes in the next video. Joking. Sort of.
Meeting Prep Agent
Before every calendar event, automatically get a briefing sourced from your email, Slack channels, CRM, and the web. No manual research required.
Salesforce (or any CRM)
Apollo
Gmail
SlackConnect your tools
SalesforceApolloGmailSlackWalk the agent through your prep process
Get me recent interactions with Emily at Torchlight from our CRM
Get background information on Emily from Apollo
Scour the sales channel for any mention of Torchlight in the last week
Send me a beautiful HTML email with all of this informationYour process might look different. That’s the point. Walk the agent through your version so it learns exactly how you like to be prepared.
Create a skill
Build a skill from thisNow in a new conversation, the agent will read its skill first and follow your process exactly.
Set up a trigger
Prepare me 15 minutes before every meeting on my calendarThe agent will set up a trigger that fires before each meeting, sends itself a prompt with the meeting details, and executes the steps from your skill. You get a briefing in your inbox without lifting a finger.