How Do I Prep for a Meeting With an AI Agent?

I typically have my chief of staff AI agent review my calendar and help me decide which meetings I need to spend more time prepping for and which ones need follow-up actions (30:04). I walked through how in the Women Applying AI session on October 7, 2026.

Which meetings need prep, and which need a follow-up?

For a meeting with an organization, I listed the questions I want looked into:

From the recording, 30:19. If I'm meeting with an organization, have they been in the press recently? Have they shared a press release? Is there anything they're celebrating?

I use my AI agent's connectors to do that prep (30:28). Connectors are where I give the AI agent access to my calendar, email, Salesforce and Slack (25:59).

What does the one-page brief ask for?

The instructions file on the session page, the one builders upload in the live build, has a section called "Prep before a call". It tells the AI agent which research tools to use:

From the instructions file on the session page. If I ask you to prep me for a call or a meeting with a specific person or brand, use whichever research connectors I have connected: look up recent news on them with Exa, read their website and press page with Firecrawl, and check their public social posts with Apify.

And it names what comes back:

From the instructions file on the session page. Give me a one-page brief: what they've been up to, anything relevant to what we're discussing, and a drafted reply or talking points in my Gmail drafts if Gmail is connected.

Which tools does the research use?

In the session I named three research tools I typically use.

From the recording, 30:46. Firecrawl, Exa, and Apify are three that I typically use.

Of Exa I said it is similar to Google but built for AI agents.

From the recording, 27:30. Exa is similar to Google, but it's built for agents.

I recommended Apify for prepping with public LinkedIn pages (29:01), and I said Firecrawl goes through websites and pulls information on my behalf (29:51).

How do you connect a tool?

On my relationship to Gumloop, I said this: The build in the session ran in Gumloop.

From the recording, 33:22. I don't work for Gumloop. I found this tool over the summer through Lenny's podcast, and I started using it and have since made myself an ambassador for them. I've created a relationship with Gumloop. I am not an employee.

The steps, as shown October 7, 2026:

1. 01

   Open the connector section.

   Select the plus icon next to Add.

2. 02

   Add the tools you want.

   In the session I added Google Drive, Sheets, Gmail and a calendar, ones I had connected before. Exa, Apify and Firecrawl are the three research tools I typically use.

3. 03

   Select Save.

   You'll notice a confirmation that your connectors are there when you review the connectors section (31:29).

If you want to try the questions yourself, here are two slot swaps of my wording. Both are examples; replace the brackets with yours.

• Example, replace with yours. Prep me for my meeting with [organization]. Have they been in the press recently? Have they shared a press release? Is there anything they're celebrating?
• Example, replace with yours. Prep me for my call with [guest or host name]. What have they been up to? What is relevant to what we're discussing? Give me talking points as a draft.

What goes wrong

Three things from the recording and the file, in the order they came up.

A private page. I was describing public LinkedIn pages when I said it:

From the recording, 29:18. If it's a private page, it will not read it

No research tool connected. The instructions file covers that case:

From the instructions file on the session page. If none are connected, tell me plainly you're working from general knowledge only, not a live lookup.

A connectors screen that does not close on its own. As a best practice, go ahead and hit save:

From the recording, 31:20. You actually have to click the save button to exit out of the screen

What the recording does not show: a finished meeting brief, or Exa, Apify or Firecrawl being connected. The one-page brief comes from the instructions file on the session page.

Where this comes from

This article grows from the session I taught live with Women Applying AI on October 7, 2026. The quoted passages are my own words, taken verbatim from the recording. The steps, tables and checklists around them were drafted by my team's AI agents from those words and my published pages, and checked against the recording before publishing. Screen steps are dated as shown October 7, 2026, and screens change. Platform facts that have a public source carry the dated line below.

Build Your First AI Agent in One Hour: the full session with the clips, the prompts and the transcript.

Checked on 2026-11-05 against Gumloop's agents documentation, which lists Gmail, Salesforce, Slack and Notion among the connectors an AI agent can use.

Related reading: Which Connectors Does an AI Agent Need?, What Does a Chief of Staff AI Agent Do?.