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Hourly

Get a research brief before external meetings

Before each external meeting, a short brief on the other company is saved to Drive and the link is emailed to you.

Runs
Hourly
Apps
Google Calendar, Google Drive
AI
Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
Access
calendar.readonly; drive.file

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every hour, find external meetings in the next day on my calendar, research the attendee's company, save a brief to Drive and email me the link.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

A founder has four or five calls a day with prospects, investors and partners. She often joins with only the company name in her head, spends the first minutes asking basic questions and misses the chance to make the call about them.

A one-page brief prepared before each external meeting gives her the company's background and recent news in the five minutes before she joins.

What you get out of it

  • Better first impressions

    Knowing what the other company does and what changed recently lets you open with a relevant question instead of a general one.

  • Preparation that fits a busy day

    A short brief is quick to read between calls, unlike researching each company from scratch.

  • Briefs kept for later

    Every brief is saved in Drive, so you can look back before a second meeting or share it with a colleague joining the call.

  • Internal meetings are left out

    Only meetings with people outside your company get a brief, so you are not sent notes about your own team.

How it works

What happens, step by step

  1. Every hour ClickRuntime checks your Google Calendar for meetings in the next day with people outside your company.

  2. It skips meetings that already have a brief.

  3. It reads the other company's website, and AI writes a one-page brief with what they do, recent news and suggested questions.

  4. The brief is saved as a document in your Drive folder and you get an email with the link.

Before it runs live

  • Connect Google Calendar
  • Connect Google Drive

What you get

RunsHourly
Get a research brief before external meetingstoday, 9:00Succeeded
Email · Meeting briefBrief: Intro call with Acme Robotics (tomorrow 10:00). Open the brief in Google Docs

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.
  • Your own rules

    Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.

  • Any number of apps

    One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.

  • AI where it helps

    Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.

  • On a schedule or on each event

    Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

  • Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
  • Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
  • Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
  • Combine it with other Google Calendar and Google Drive steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.
pre_call_research_brief_for_upcoming_meetings.pyexample
from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, state, notify, ai, http

MY_DOMAIN, FOLDER = "northwind.example", "briefs-folder-id"

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    creds = Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work"))
    now = datetime.now(timezone.utc)
    events = build("calendar", "v3", credentials=creds, cache_discovery=False).events().list(calendarId="primary",
             timeMin=now.isoformat(), timeMax=(now + timedelta(days=1)).isoformat(), singleEvents=True).execute()["items"]
    done = state.get("done") or []
    for e in events:
        domains = {a["email"].split("@")[1] for a in e.get("attendees", [])} - {MY_DOMAIN, "gmail.com"}
        if e["id"] in done or not domains:
            continue
        domain = sorted(domains)[0]
        page = BeautifulSoup(http.get(f"https://{domain}", timeout=10).text, "html.parser").get_text(" ", strip=True)[:6000]
        brief = ai.generate(f"Write a one-page pre-call brief on {domain} for '{e.get('summary')}':\n{page}", max_output_tokens=700).text
        doc = http.post("https://www.googleapis.com/upload/drive/v3/files?uploadType=multipart", headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {creds.token}"},
                        files={"metadata": (None, f'{{"name": "Brief - {domain}", "mimeType": "application/vnd.google-apps.document", "parents": ["{FOLDER}"]}}', "application/json"),
                               "file": ("b.txt", brief, "text/plain")}).json()
        notify.email_me(f"Brief: {e.get('summary')}", f"https://docs.google.com/document/d/{doc['id']}/edit")
        done.append(e["id"])
    state.set("done", done[-300:])
    return {"briefs": len(done)}

FAQ

Common questions

Where does the research come from?
From the company's own website and public pages found from the attendee's email domain. The brief notes where facts came from so you can check them.
What if the attendee uses a personal email address?
Meetings where everyone outside your company uses a free email provider are skipped, because there is no company to look up.
Will I get two briefs for the same meeting?
No. Each meeting gets one brief, even though the calendar is checked every hour.
What permissions does it need?
calendar.readonly; drive.file. Nothing else in your accounts is used.
Does it need AI?
Yes. It uses ClickRuntime's built-in AI, so you don't need an OpenAI or Anthropic key. Every plan includes a monthly AI allowance.
How many runs does it use?
One run each time it runs (hourly). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.
Can I change how it works?
Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Set up “Get a research brief before external meetings” from your assistant

Copy the prompt above, or connect your assistant first. Free plan, no credit card.