Imagine this scene
A senior leader has a stakeholder meeting tomorrow. They need a two-page briefing document covering the context, the key players, the talking points, and the risks. You have three hours and a pile of source material. AI compresses the pile. You bring the judgment.
A briefing document isn’t just a summary — it’s a decision support tool. It has to answer: what does this person need to know, what decisions might they face, what questions might they be asked, and what are the risks they should watch for. AI can help you structure and compress source material efficiently. What it cannot do is know what’s sensitive, politically significant, or organizationally important — that context has to come from you.
Key Insight
The hardest part of a briefing document isn’t the writing — it’s the curation. Deciding what to include and what to leave out is a judgment call AI cannot make for you.
The most efficient workflow for briefing documents: gather your source material first (articles, internal notes, previous communications, background documents), then give AI the full package and ask it to extract the most important points by category — context, key stakeholders, recent developments, outstanding issues, risks. Use that extraction as the skeleton for your brief. Then add the institutional knowledge and judgment that transforms the skeleton into something actually useful to a senior leader.
Briefing documents often go to people making important decisions. The accuracy bar is higher than for most content. Every statistic AI includes should be traceable to a source you provided. Every claim should reflect what was in your input materials — not what AI hallucinated from its training data. Build in a QA step: ask AI to flag any claim in the brief where it is uncertain or where the claim is not directly supported by the materials you provided.
Executives don’t read briefing documents the way editors read manuscripts. They skim. They look for the headline, the key risk, and the recommended action. Ask AI to structure the output for a senior reader: headline summary at the top (2–3 sentences), key points in bullets, supporting context underneath. Anything longer than two pages should be considered for further compression. The goal is a document they can absorb in five minutes, not fifteen.
Use AI to compress source material into an executive-ready briefing document, then layer in the context only you can provide.
Choose a briefing scenario: an upcoming meeting, a stakeholder engagement, a press opportunity, or a policy decision. Gather the source material you’d normally read in preparation — 2–5 documents, articles, or summaries.
Feed the source material to AI and ask it to extract key points in four categories: background/context, key stakeholders, recent developments, and risks or open questions. Review the extraction for accuracy against your sources.
Ask AI to draft a two-page briefing document from the extraction. Specify the format: executive summary at the top (3 sentences), followed by each category in brief paragraphs, followed by a list of likely questions the leader might face.
Now add the layer AI couldn’t produce: the organizational context. What does this leader specifically need to know about the relationships involved? What’s politically sensitive? What’s the history here? Add those elements manually.
Run a QA pass: verify every statistic, check every factual claim, and flag any statement that can’t be traced back to your source material. Remove or correct anything that can’t be verified.
