How to pick up where your last meeting left off

Groupthink is a memory for the people in your life and work. The recap email it sends after a recorded meeting now ends with a section called Suggested openers for next time. It holds one to three short lines about what the conversation left open, for the next time the same people talk.

In short: to pick up where your last meeting left off, open the recap email Groupthink sent after it and read the last section, Suggested openers for next time. It lists up to three short prompts about what the conversation left open.

What “Suggested openers for next time” says in the recap email

Groupthink writes a recap in parts: a summary, decisions, tasks, notes. One of those parts has been written since 2024 and saved with the meeting, but the email never showed it. Groupthink asks the AI model that writes it for one to three prompts or questions, each ten words or fewer, that pick up an unresolved issue, continue a discussion that mattered or move a topic forward. It also asks for no names.

The openers are built from the same material as the rest of the recap: the transcript, the list of attendees, the agenda’s objective, and the agenda items and the notes on them. After a planning call, the section could read like this example:

Suggested openers for next time

• Did the venue confirm the spring dates?
• Where did the budget question land?
• Who is following up with the caterer?

In the email, the section comes last, below the summary, Key Decisions, Tasks and Important Notes.

Who gets the recap email, and when it has no openers

Everyone who receives the full recap of a meeting sees the same openers. That includes a gifted recap and a recap shared by email with someone who has no Groupthink account.

The recap email goes to the meeting’s hosts and to anyone invited from the agenda’s Share window in Groupthink. People who are on the meeting only because they were on the calendar invite don’t get it automatically. The help page on ending a meeting has the full rule.

There are four cases where you won’t see the section. If Groupthink has no openers saved for a meeting, the section is left out. If Groupthink could not write a summary, the email says “No summary for this one” and carries no openers under it. The locked version of the email, headed “Your recap is locked”, shows none of the recap and none of the openers. And a meeting with no transcript gets no recap at all.

The recap sent to Slack does not include the openers, and the recap page in the web app does not show them yet.

Why loose ends get lost between meetings

A recap is usually read once, soon after the meeting, as a record of what happened. The next conversation with the same people might be a week away or three months away. By then the decisions are often still clear and the loose ends are gone: the question nobody answered, the thing someone said they would look into.

The openers are prompts, written by Groupthink from the transcript and the agenda. Ten words are enough to bring a subject back to mind. Groupthink picks which loose ends to list. The reader decides whether any of them is worth raising, and how.

They also sit beside the tasks without repeating them. A task is something a person agreed to do. An opener is something worth asking about. Tasks have their own post: Groupthink keeps track of what you promised.

If you host a recorded meeting, the section is in its recap email when Groupthink has openers for it. If you don’t have Groupthink yet, start your 30-day Pro trial at app.groupthink.com.

Suggested openers for next time is live now in the recap email.