Automate Meeting Summaries and Action Items in 15 Minutes

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• How to configure a Power Automate flow to trigger on new meeting transcripts.
• How to write a multi-part AI prompt to extract decisions and action items.
• How to connect the automation to the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
• How to format and deliver the final summary directly into Microsoft Teams.

The VP of Operations at a 350-person logistics company just finished her fourth back-to-back video call. The day was a blur of strategic planning, a quarterly budget review, a vendor negotiation, and a project post-mortem. Critical decisions were made and action items were assigned in each, but they exist only as scattered notes in her notebook and a 47-minute recording for each meeting. The real work of synthesizing, distributing, and tracking these outcomes still remains.

This gap between discussion and execution is where productivity breaks down. The VP now faces three hours of administrative work: re-listening to recordings, deciphering cryptic notes, and manually emailing stakeholders to confirm who owns which task. Important context gets lost, action items are forgotten, and project momentum stalls.

This article details a complete, step-by-step automation that solves this problem. It shows how to build a workflow that automatically picks up new meeting transcripts, uses a specialized AI prompt to extract every key decision and action item, and delivers a clean, structured summary to your team's workspace.

This productivity workflow uses native tools within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem: Microsoft Teams for meetings, OneDrive or SharePoint for transcript storage, and Power Automate to connect the services. The AI processing is handled by the Azure OpenAI Service, which keeps all data within your company's secure cloud environment.

Time to value: 15 minutes for initial setup.

The Full Automation Setup: From Transcript to Action

The goal is to create a hands-off system. When a Teams meeting ends, its transcript is automatically processed by an AI, and a summary is posted to a designated channel.

Step 1: Configure the Power Automate Trigger

The automation begins the moment a meeting transcript is available. Microsoft Teams automatically saves these as .vtt files to a specific folder. The trigger for this workflow is a new file being created in that location.

• Navigate to Power Automate: Open your Microsoft 365 environment and go to the Power Automate application.
• Create a New Flow: Select "Create" and choose "Automated cloud flow."
• Choose Your Trigger: Search for "When a file is created" and select the SharePoint or OneDrive trigger.
• Configure the Trigger: Set the Site Address and Folder Path to your transcript storage location.

Step 2: Get File Content and Prepare for AI

The trigger only knows a file was created; it does not contain the file's content. The next step is to retrieve the transcript text.

• Add "Get file content" Action: Click "New step" and search for the SharePoint action "Get file content."
• Provide the File Identifier: Select the "x-ms-file-id" dynamic content from the trigger step.

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