At AgifyMD, every call with a customer or a prospect is recorded, transcribed, and summarized by Recapify, a tool we built for ourselves. Clean, complete summaries, all in one place. Nothing gets lost anymore.
Then, while preparing our new pricing, we reread our sales calls from the past few months. We had quoted six different pricing structures from one call to the next. Every call was perfectly summarized. Every summary said exactly what we’d promised. Nobody had read it before the next call.
AI made call notes free. That’s real progress. But it also created an illusion: because everything is written down, it feels like everything is being followed up. Except a note describes what was said. An action has a verb, an owner, and a date.
“The head of department is waiting for clinical data” is a note. “Pierre sends the clinical study to the head of department by Thursday” is an action. The first one is reassuring. The second one moves the deal forward.
So the question to ask AI after a call isn’t “summarize this call.” It’s “list everything anyone promised, to whom, and by when.” Every promise then goes into a tracker: who owns it, when it’s due, and what proof will show it’s done.
The proof column is the one everyone forgets. “Done” is not proof. An email sent, a proposal logged in the CRM, a meeting on the client’s calendar: those are proof. If you don’t know what trace will show a promise was kept, you’ll never know whether it was.
That leaves deciding what AI does on its own. My rule fits in three words: automate, prepare, approve.
- Automate anything with no consequence for the customer: filing the summary, filling in the factual CRM fields, creating the task with its due date.
- Prepare anything that goes to the customer: the follow-up draft lands in the rep’s inbox, written and ready, but not sent.
- Approve anything that commits the company: a price, a deadline, a discount. A human reads that. Every time.
A summary kept this way is less pretty. Ten lines instead of two pages. But every call ends with a list of promises, and every promise has an owner.
The template: the promise tracker
After every call, paste the transcript into your assistant with this instruction:
From this transcript, list only the commitments made by either side. For each one: what was promised, by whom, to whom, and by when. If no date was given, write “date to be set.” Do not add any commitment that wasn’t actually said.
Then fill in the tracker:
Seen in the field
The promise that gets forgotten most often isn’t the proposal. It’s the small thing promised in passing at the end of the call: “I’ll send you the link.” And it’s often the one the customer remembers.