Telstra is taking its board AI agent into the minutes

Board minutes are one of the oldest documents in corporate life and one of the least loved. Someone sits at the end of the table, writes fast and spends the next two days turning shorthand into a record that will be read by regulators, lawyers and, occasionally, a court. Nobody gets promoted for doing it well.

Telstra launched an AI agent for its board in June. The pitch then was modest: help directors sift papers before a meeting and free time for the issues that matter. The agent summarises and checks papers or resolutions. It does not make decisions and it does not advise. Now the company is taking it down a level, into the work of the people who prepare for and record those meetings.

What is in testing

Craig Emery, company secretary and legal executive at Telstra, described two pieces. An agent in testing drafts board minutes from the company secretary's own notes of the meeting. A Copilot "super prompt" helps staff prepare board papers by applying approved style guides, readability metrics and templates. Emery's phrase was "moving beyond the boardroom to how we help prepare for and capture board meetings".

He also said how directors have actually used the first version, which is more useful than the launch copy. Beyond summaries of earlier papers on an issue, directors have used the agent to clarify questions while preparing, or to remind themselves where a discussion on a topic had got to. That is memory work. It is the thing a good company secretary does in the corridor before a meeting.

The controls

The agent sits in a walled garden inside Telstra's own environment and was built through the company's data and AI joint venture with Accenture. Emery said the team did a lot of testing before release. Every director completed Telstra's responsible AI training before using it, and that training is mandatory for anyone at Telstra before they use an AI tool in their work. Part of it covers the need to critically evaluate what the tool produces.

I like that the rule applies to directors too. Most organisations make the frontline sit the course and quietly exempt the people at the top. Telstra did the reverse of that, at least on paper.

Why it matters

Minutes are a governance record, not a productivity artefact. A draft that reads well but misstates who objected to what is worse than no draft at all. So the interesting design choice is the input. The agent works from the company secretary's notes, not from a recording of the room. A person still decides what happened, and the tool turns that into the house style. That keeps judgment where the accountability sits.

The Australian Institute of Company Directors has warned directors against inaccurate or biased outputs and against weak staff skills when agents spread across a team. Telstra's answer is training before access and a narrow job for the tool. It is a reasonable answer. Whether it holds up depends on the people reviewing each draft having the confidence to say it is wrong.

What this means for L&D

If your executives are about to get an agent, the training cannot be the generic module everyone else sat. Directors and company secretaries need practice at the specific failure: a fluent summary that is subtly off. That is a critical thinking skill as much as an AI one. Telstra has made the course a gate. The next step is making sure the gate teaches people to read a confident paragraph with suspicion.

Sources: SmartCompany, 27 October 2026. Background: Telstra Exchange.