How AI is helping turn advice into action

As a small business owner, you may be juggling competing priorities, making it easy for good ideas and agreed actions to get lost in your day-to-day operations.

That’s where Business Mentors New Zealand (BMNZ) and their Mentoring Assistant can help you stay on track.

The tool automatically creates a summary of each mentoring session, capturing key discussion points, actions and next steps.

The result is less time spent taking notes and a clearer plan for turning advice into action.

A mentoring conversation only creates value if the agreed actions are followed through.

The Mentoring Assistant helps you keep track of what was discussed and what needs to happen next, giving both the mentor and you a shared record of priorities and responsibilities.

Sarah Trotman, CEO of Business Mentors New Zealand, says the goal is to help business owners leave every session with a clear understanding of their next steps.

"We wanted business owners to walk away from every session knowing exactly what had been agreed and who was responsible for what."

By automatically capturing meeting notes, the tool allows business owners to focus on the conversation rather than trying to write everything down.

Ashton Norton, founder of Unyceet, says it has helped him get more value from mentoring sessions.

"You can always tell when someone is only half listening because they're trying to write everything down at the same time. With the Mentoring Assistant taking care of that, I'm fully present in the conversation. I can ask better questions, engage more deeply, and get far more value from the time with my mentor."

“And the Mentoring Assistant is wicked. It has literally saved me a job. After every meeting, I would normally replay the discussion and write notes from memory."

“Now the key takeaways and agreed actions are captured for me automatically, and they're incredibly accurate. For me, those actions are the most valuable part, and the summaries have been bang on every time."

For many business owners, the Mentoring Assistant is also their first introduction to AI.

Carolyn Baines, founder of South Pacific Education Courses (SPEC), says seeing AI summarise mentoring sessions showed her how the technology could save time and support decision-making. She now uses AI tools in other areas of her business.

During the mentoring process, her mentor used the Mentoring Assistant, and the impact was immediate.

"Before, I'd come away from a mentoring meeting and have to sift back through everything to work out what actually mattered."

“Now I can easily track the actions we've agreed on and stay focused on making progress. The AI Mentoring Assistant captures the key points and next steps clearly, which means I spend less time trying to reconstruct conversations and more time acting on them."

“It's a simple change that has made a real difference."

Business Mentors New Zealand has more information about mentoring, including how they use AI.