That inspiring conference is fading: Capture it in one hour
If you're attending any professional development conferences this summer, here's a simple way to get far more value out of them using AI.
I returned from the AeXIS Annual Conference for California independent school advancement leaders. I want to show you how I use AI to get the most out of any conference I attend.
The morning after I got home, I made one folder on my computer and moved every artifact from the conference into it:
the program PDF, with the detailed session descriptions
a copy of every deck from the sessions I attended (shout out to the conference organizers!)
all of my voice notes from the two days — the to-dos, the people to follow up with, and the random lightbulb ideas I'd captured in the moment
FYI, I keep a structured folder vault for this, but you don't need anything special. Any folder on your desktop works.
Then I opened Claude Cowork, pointed it at the folder, and asked it to organize everything in a way that mattered to me, weighted toward the work it already knows I do, with a little verbal direction along the way.
Here's what Claude and I produced, in well under an hour:
A summary of each session (the deck combined with my own notes and reactions into one clean overview).
A conference themes file synthesizing the threads that mattered most to me across all the sessions.
A map-of-contents (MOC) file indexing everything, so months from now I can find any idea, note, or thread without digging.
An action list — whom to follow up with, which ideas to study further, what to research next.
To be clear: it created new files in that folder and wrote all of this organized content for me.
AI took the firehose I always come home with — the inspiration, the decks, the half-formed thoughts — and turned it into organized, referenceable, documented knowledge. Six months from now, I can point Cowork back at that same folder and ask about something I half-remember, or take a new idea I'm chewing on and connect it to what I heard at the conference.
For everyone who keeps asking, "I don't know what to do with AI" — here's the takeaway. This isn't about AI generating content for you. It's about doing the work: the strategic thinking, the organizing, the synthesizing. That's where the real value is.
