A Prompt for Every Meeting: The Pre-Meeting Intel Brief

Most of the prompts I write get used once and forgotten. This one didn’t. It became my most-run prompt of the year, and I still reach for it before almost every meeting that matters.

Here’s the job it does. You have a meeting on the calendar with someone you don’t know well, at a company you don’t know well, about a topic you can’t afford to fumble. You could spend 45 minutes clicking through their site, their LinkedIn, a few news articles, and an earnings call you half-skim. Or you paste one prompt, fill in the brackets, and walk in with a tight briefing memo about three minutes later.

I made a short video walking through it too, if you’d rather watch than read: the free AI prompt that saves every meeting on YouTube.

The pre-meeting intel prompt

Copy this straight into ChatGPT or Claude, fill in your brackets, and run it.

I’m meeting to discuss [Topic / Project] with [Participant Name], the [Role] at [Company].

Your Role

Act as a senior researcher specializing in [Industry].

Deliverable

Produce a crisp, 600-words-or-fewer briefing memo that equips me to walk into the meeting fully informed. Structure your response with the following titled sections (use bold headings):

Company Snapshot: founding year, HQ location, flagship products and services, recent lawsuits, latest revenue and growth figures.

Industry Landscape: market size, growth rate, top trends, 3 major competitors, lawsuits, and industry challenges.

Strategic Priorities & Challenges: what the company is publicly prioritizing (from earnings calls, press releases, job posts) and key pain points.

Meeting Participant Profile: career role progression, notable achievements, public statements, and published work or patents.

Recent News (last 6 months): 3 to 5 bullet headlines with one line of significance each.

Partnerships & Relationships: investors, partners, or my mutual connections that matter.

Meeting-Ready Insights: 3 talking points I can lead with, plus 3 sharp questions to uncover deeper intel.

Cited Sources: list URLs or publication names (no full text).

Writing Style

• Bullet points over paragraphs; lead with the takeaway.
• Bold key figures or phrases for scanability.
• Keep jargon light and note any acronyms on first use.

Process

• Think step-by-step to gather and vet data, but show only the polished memo.
• If data is scarce, flag the gap rather than guessing.

That last line carries more weight than it looks. “Flag the gap rather than guessing” is what separates a memo you can trust from one that makes you sound confident about something that isn’t true.

Why it earns its keep

The prompt looks long, but every block is pulling a lever.

It assigns a role. “Act as a senior researcher in this industry” sets the depth and tone before the model writes a word, so you get analysis instead of a Wikipedia summary.

It names the sections. I’m not hoping the model thinks to cover the participant’s background or the company’s recent lawsuits. I’m telling it exactly what I need on the page, in the order I want to read it.

It caps the length and demands citations. A 600-word ceiling forces the model to prioritize, and asking for sources keeps it accountable for where the facts came from. If it can’t cite something, I treat it as a lead, not a fact.

That’s the same move I lean on across most of my AI marketing prompts: give the model a clear role, a tight output spec, and a rule for what to do when it doesn’t know. That’s what turns a chatbot into a research assistant.

Run it before your next meeting

Use a model with live web access so the “recent news” section is actually recent. ChatGPT 5.x and Gemini 2.x both pull current results well, and Claude (Opus 4.6) is strong when you want it to reason carefully over what it finds. Picking the right tool for the job is the whole point of how I think about where AI fits in marketing.

1. Drop in the topic, the person, their role, the company, and the industry.
2. Run it the morning of, not a week ahead, so the news is fresh.
3. Skim the memo, then read the three talking points and three questions twice. That’s the part you’ll actually use in the room.

It takes about three minutes. The first time you walk into a meeting already knowing the other person’s last big initiative, and the question nobody else thought to ask, you’ll wonder how you ever ran on a cold open. Try it on your next one and hit reply to tell me how it went.

Get the prompt that earns its way into your routine

Most prompts I try get deleted by the end of the week. The few that survive, the ones I keep reaching for before real meetings and real client work, go out to my list every Friday with the full copy-paste block and the reasoning behind every line. If a three-minute briefing just saved you a frantic pre-meeting scramble, the next keeper is already drafted.

Subscribe free →