AI secretary for a team: what Mia does today in meetings, in the channel and with the calendar — and where today's tools stop (2026)

An AI secretary is the part of a secretary's job that is clerical rather than personal: preparing what a meeting needs, writing down what it produced, listing who promised what by when, putting the next meeting in the calendar and answering, a month later, what was decided and where it is written. It does not take the decision and does not sit in the chair; it keeps the paper in order so that the people who decide do not have to.

The idea is older than the software. Any organization with more than a handful of meetings a week once had a person whose desk this was. Most teams of ten to two hundred never had that person — the job was spread across whoever typed fastest — and that is who the term "AI secretary" is being searched for by. This guide is the job first: what it consists of, how to hand each part over, a brief you can copy. Then the map: what the tools a team already runs on document under this heading, and what InterMIND's Mia does today.

What an AI secretary is — and what it isn't

Three jobs get called "assistant", and only one of them is the secretary's:

A note taker is one task of the secretary's. The difference is continuity: the secretary knows the previous meeting when the next one starts, knows who still owes what, and can be asked on a Tuesday afternoon what was agreed on the 3rd. A summary mailed once and forgotten is not a secretary; it is a transcript with a haircut.

The six jobs of a secretary, in order

Each of these is a task that can be handed over on its own. Hand over the ones that cost you the most time first.

1. The brief before the meeting. What the previous session decided, what is still open and who owes it, what today's agenda says. A good secretary posts this before anyone asks.
2. The minutes. What was decided, what stays open, what was disputed — each with a timestamp, so a dispute later goes back to the words that were said, not to memory.
3. The list of promises. Every "I'll send it by Friday", with the owner and the day, taken from the meeting itself rather than from someone's notes of it.
4. The follow-up in the calendar. When the host says "next Thursday at three", a meeting exists at that time with the same people, and the event is in the calendar in each invitee's time zone.
5. The answer from the record. "What did we agree with the distributor in March?" answered from the recaps, with a link to the place where it was said.
6. The carry-over. When the next session starts, the open items of the last one are read back and marked done, not done with the reason, or not discussed — so nothing is quietly dropped.

The first three are what every meeting tool now sells as "AI". The last three are where most of them stop, and they are the three that make the first three worth having.

How to hand a job to an AI secretary

Before: give it the room, not a file. A secretary that only sees what you paste into it has no memory. Hold recurring meetings in one place that keeps their history — a channel, a recurring room — so that "last time" means something to the software. Put the agenda where the meeting is, not in a separate document the assistant cannot read.

During: say outcomes aloud. Every secretary, human or machine, writes down what was said. "So we go with vendor B" and "Anna, the estimate by Friday" are what make it into the record; a decision everybody understood but nobody said is not a decision the secretary can keep. If the assistant can be addressed in the room, address it by name for actions and let it listen for the rest.

After: read the list back, then assign. The minutes are a draft until someone with authority has read them. Check three things: that each decision is a decision, that each promise has an owner and a day, that each open item is marked open rather than lost. Then let the follow-up go into the calendar.

Weeks later: ask the record, not the room. The test of a secretary is whether a question about March is answered from March's record, with a link, rather than by a new meeting. Ask it the first time you would otherwise ask a colleague.

A brief you can copy

Hand this to any assistant that can see your meetings — in the room, in a channel or from the assistant you already use. Replace the brackets.

Secretary brief — [team or channel]
Before each session: post what the previous session decided, what is still open and who owns it, and today's agenda from [where the agenda lives].
During: record every decision, every action item with owner and day, and every question that was raised and not answered. Do not infer; record what was said.
After: send the recap to everyone invited, in their own language. List open items at the top.
Follow-up: when [host] names a date, create the meeting with the same people and put it in the calendar.
On request: answer "what did we decide about X" from the recaps, with a link to where it was said.
Never: take a decision, assign a task nobody accepted, or send anything to a new address without [host] confirming.

The last line matters more than the others. A secretary that acts without confirmation is a liability; one that drafts and waits is a colleague.

AI executive assistant: the job and the part of it that already runs

An AI executive assistant is the same role scoped to one person rather than a team: the executive's calendar, the executive's inbox, the executive's meetings. The queries overlap because the job overlaps, and it is worth separating what the software does from what the title implies.

The executive assistant's work has four parts. Two of them run in software today, for a team as much as for one person:

• Meetings and their record. Minutes, action items, carry-over and the calendar follow-up — the six jobs above. This runs.
• Answering from the record. "What did I promise the board last month?" from the meetings themselves rather than from memory. This runs wherever the assistant can read the meetings.

Two of them do not, or run only as drafts:

• Judgement about people. Who to let into the calendar, who to put off, what the boss would say — this stays with a person, and an assistant that pretends otherwise is dangerous rather than helpful.
• The inbox. Drafting replies is common; sending them unread is where most organizations draw the line, and rightly.

So the part of an AI executive assistant that already runs is the secretary: the record and the calendar. The brief above is the same brief with one name in the brackets instead of a team's.

Where today's tools stop

The three platforms most teams already pay for each have something under this heading. The table lists documented behaviour only, from each vendor's own pages, by the six jobs of the secretary; the month each page was checked is in the Sources footer.

Two things are the same across the three incumbents. The record is written in the language the meeting was held in — Google states it, Microsoft states it, Zoom documents a summary of the spoken transcript — and it reaches the people the host or an admin chose, in one copy. And the step from "next steps identified" to "a meeting exists on Thursday with these people" is, on the pages we checked, either a person's click or a product sold separately and in one region first.

What Mia does today

InterMIND is a communication space that sits next to Teams, Slack or Google Workspace, and Mia is the secretary inside it. This is what she does on a paid plan today, in the order a team meets it.

The record stays in each member's language, and it is kept. Every meeting in a channel ends with a recap: the summary with timestamps, the transcript and the recording, at one permanent link, read by each signed-in member in their own language — the record is translated per reader, not written once in the language the room happened to use. It arrives by email, as a message in the channel and as a link in the calendar event. Any member edits it, every edit keeps author and revision history, and the channel keeps the recap of every past session. A copy can go to a CRM address from the channel's Recap copy setting. The recap documentation has the details.

Ask her from any screen. The right panel of the app — ⌘/ on a Mac, Ctrl+/ elsewhere, or Help in the sidebar — is Mia when you are signed in on a paid plan. She knows the screen you are on and answers from your meetings, chats and files; she can prepare a meeting link or a message for you to confirm, and the conversation is saved. In a channel, the lock next to the message field reads Ask Mia about this channel: she reads that channel's chat, files and recaps, and the thread stays in the channel. On a paid plan she can also search the web and gives the address of what she found; an admin can turn that off. Without a paid plan she answers from the documentation.

Work from the assistant you already use. Every registered account can connect Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any MCP client to InterMIND, and the assistant acts as you. Reading: the newest recaps, a phrase searched over your recaps with a snippet and the link, the transcript by speaker, your meetings and channels, a channel's messages in your language, your documents. Acting: a meeting link now, a meeting at a local time written to your connected Google or Microsoft calendar with the invitees, a message posted into a channel as you — translated for every reader. So "What did we agree with Acme last week? Check my InterMIND recaps" and "Set up a call with the Lyon team Thursday at three and put it in my calendar" are one line each, in whichever assistant you keep open. The assistant cannot join a meeting, speak in it or change your settings; a call made through it counts as your activity. Setup per client is in AI assistants (MCP).

In the meeting itself, for selected accounts. As of 18 October 2026, Mia in the meeting runs for selected accounts while it is being refined: she answers by name aloud, each participant in their own language, posts what the previous session decided at the start, notes a commitment the moment it is spoken, and on the host's word schedules the follow-up into the commander's calendar — with an Undo button in the chat. The carry-over of open items into the next recap and the start of the next session runs the same way. What she does in the room is described in the AI meeting assistant guide; neither is switched on for every organization yet.

A guest joins by link, without an account and at no cost — from a phone, in the browser — and hears the meeting live in their own language. There is no record for a guest afterwards: the account is free, and it is what makes the record reachable. The host provides the space and, on a paid plan, pays only for the members active in the previous 28 days — joined a meeting, wrote in a chat or asked Mia; members who go quiet keep their access at no cost. All of it runs on the organization's chosen AI gateway — Azure OpenAI in the EU Data Zone by default, Vertex AI in the EU on request, or Bedrock in the organization's own AWS account — with nothing kept after processing, and the AI features switch turns Mia off with everything else.

• Open a complete recap — a real record rendered by the same code that writes yours.
• Try the live demo — no signup; speak, and hear the room translated per listener.

A secretary is judged a month later, not the same afternoon: by whether the question about March gets an answer with a link. Hand over the six jobs one at a time, keep the last line of the brief, and read the list back before it goes out.

FAQ

What is an AI secretary?

An AI assistant that carries the clerical work around a team's meetings: the brief before, the minutes and the list of action items after, the follow-up meeting in the calendar, and answers from the record weeks later — "what did we decide about X, and where is it written". It differs from an AI note taker by continuity: it knows the previous meeting when the next one starts and who still owes what.

What does an AI executive assistant do?

The same job scoped to one person: that person's meetings, record and calendar. The part that runs in software today is the secretary's — minutes, action items, carry-over, the follow-up in the calendar, answers from the record. Judgement about people and sending mail unread stay with a person; most tools draft and wait for a click.

Can an AI secretary schedule meetings?

Depends on the tool. On the vendor pages checked for this post, Zoom's ZoomMate "schedules events in Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook" and is sold separately, North America first; Microsoft's Facilitator and Google's Meet notes do not describe scheduling. In InterMIND, an assistant connected over MCP creates a meeting at a local time and writes it to your connected Google or Microsoft calendar with the invitees; in the room, Mia does the same on the host's word for selected accounts.

Can an AI assistant take minutes in a meeting?

Yes, on the three platforms most teams already run on: Teams (Facilitator notes, Copilot recap), Zoom (AI Companion summary) and Google Meet ("Take notes for me") each write a summary after a transcribed meeting, in the one language the meeting was held in, for the recipients the host or admin chose. InterMIND writes the recap with timestamps and each member reads it in their own language, with edits kept in version history.

Is an AI secretary safe for confidential meetings?

Look at three things in the documentation: where the model runs, what is kept after processing, and who may give it orders. In InterMIND the organization chooses the AI gateway — Azure OpenAI in the EU Data Zone by default, Vertex AI in the EU on request, or Bedrock in its own AWS account — nothing is kept after processing, Mia reads only the meetings you attend, and an action in the room runs only on the host's or a moderator's word, with undo.

Does Microsoft Copilot work as a secretary in Teams meetings?

Partly, as documented: Facilitator posts the agenda and notes during the meeting and tracks tasks in Planner in public preview; it needs a Copilot license, works for organizers and presenters in internal meetings, and takes notes in one selected language. Scheduling a follow-up from the room and carrying open items into the next session are not described on Microsoft's Facilitator pages.

Sources: Microsoft Learn — Set up Facilitator in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Support — Facilitator in Microsoft Teams meetings, Zoom Support — Meeting questions with AI, Zoom — Zoom launches ZoomMate, Google Workspace Updates — Ask Gemini in Meet, Google Workspace Updates — "Take notes for me" now captures "next steps", checked September 2026; Microsoft — Recap in Microsoft Teams and Zoom — Using Meeting Summary with AI Companion, checked August 2026; Google Meet — "Take notes for me" in Google Meet, checked October 2026; InterMIND documentation — AI features, Recap, AI assistants (MCP). Vendors change plans, features, prices and language lists over time; check their pages for the current state.