Welcome to issue #1 of The Leverage Letter.

I'm Fernando — a strategy consultant, entrepreneur and market enthusiast based in Houston. I spend my early mornings observing the market prior to the New York session open, analyzing companies and understanding market fundamentals then shift into my day helping businesses solve complex problems.

A few months ago I started paying serious attention to AI tools — not as a tech enthusiast, but as someone trying to get more done without working more hours. What I found surprised me: most of the content about AI tools is written by developers for developers. There's almost nothing written for people actually running businesses.

So I decided to create the resource I wish existed.

Every Monday you'll get one AI tool reviewed through the lens of a real operator, a prompt you can use immediately, the headlines that actually matter for your business, and one action to take this week. No hype. No theory. Just what actually works.

Let's get into it.

The problem: You finish a meeting. Everyone nods. Someone says "I'll send notes." Three days later — nothing. Action items are forgotten, decisions get relitigated, and you're back in another meeting covering the same ground.

This is one of the most universal time drains in professional life — and it's completely solvable with AI in about 5 minutes.

How it works:

Step 1 — Record and transcribe. Use Otter.ai (free plan available) or Microsoft Copilot (if you're on Microsoft 365) to record your meeting and generate a transcript automatically. Otter joins as a bot, records, and gives you a full text transcript within minutes of the meeting ending.

Step 2 — Paste into Claude. Copy the transcript and paste it into Claude with the prompt below. Takes 30 seconds.

Step 3 — Review and send. Claude gives you a clean, professional meeting summary in seconds. Scan it for accuracy, make any small edits, and email it to attendees. Done.

My experience: This is a true game changer and genuinely saves a lot of time. Like any tool (specially AI) you need to ensure you carefully read the output, make edit, and ensure you don’t miss any key points, but getting 95% there in a few minutes is definitely worth mastering. As a consultant, most of our days are spent in meetings, workshops and team brainstorming sessions. Having to ability to summarize and have clear next steps for every meeting, not only does this save me time, but me team does not have to second guess the next items on our to do list. It also helps with accountability and manage timelines and expectations. This tool is one that I use every single day multiple time a day.

Microsoft Copilot users: If your organization runs Microsoft 365, Copilot does this natively inside Teams — it records, transcribes, and summarizes automatically without any extra tools. Ask your IT team to enable it. For everyone else, the Claude + Otter.ai combo works just as well at zero cost.

Verdict

This is one of the highest ROI AI workflows available right now. If you're in 5 meetings a week and each one saves you 20 minutes of note-taking, that's over an hour back every week — automatically. Start with the free tools and upgrade only when you need to.

You are an expert meeting facilitator. Summarize this meeting transcript into a professional email-ready format with these sections:

**Executive Summary** (3 sentences max)
A concise overview of what was discussed and decided.

Key Decisions
Bullet list of decisions made during the meeting.

Action Items
Each item on its own line with: Action | Owner | Deadline

Open Questions
Items that need follow-up or were left unresolved.

Keep the tone professional but conversational.
The output will be emailed directly to all attendees.

McKinsey now has 25,000 AI employees

McKinsey announced that AI agents now work alongside its 40,000 human consultants — bringing the firm's total "workforce" to over 60,000, with plans to give every human employee at least one AI agent partner.

Why it matters to you: If the world's largest consulting firm is running AI agents at this scale, your clients will start expecting the same efficiency from you. The consultants who learn to work with AI now will be the ones still winning engagements in three years. This week's issue is literally your first step.

ChatGPT just got a major upgrade

OpenAI launched GPT-5.5, making GPT-5.5 Instant the default model for all ChatGPT users this week — a meaningful jump in speed and reasoning capability that affects every professional already using it.

Why it matters to you: If you haven't opened ChatGPT in a few weeks, it's worth revisiting. The gap between free and paid AI tools is narrowing fast — which means the workflows we cover in this newsletter are becoming accessible to everyone, not just power users.

AI agents are becoming the primary users of business software

Industry leaders including major tech CEOs argue that AI agents could eventually become the dominant users of software — fundamentally reshaping how business tools are built and used. Salesforce, Stripe, and Zapier are already redesigning their platforms around this assumption

Why it matters to you: The tools you use to run your business — your CRM, your email, your project management — are being rebuilt around AI automation. Getting fluent in AI workflows now means you'll adapt faster than competitors when these changes hit your industry.

Open Otter.ai (free) or turn on Copilot in your next Teams call. Let it run. After the call, paste the transcript into Claude with the prompt above. Send the output to your client or team. That's it — first time takes 5 minutes, every time after takes 2.

Going further — the advanced version: Once you've done this manually a few times, the next level is full automation. Connect Otter.ai → Zapier → Claude API → Gmail so the moment a meeting ends, the summary is automatically emailed to all attendees without you touching anything. I'll cover this full automation in a future issue.

If you try this workflow this week, hit reply and let me know how it went. I read every response.

Pro tip: Add "Adjust the tone to be [formal/casual] and keep it under [X] words" to the end of the prompt to match your company culture.