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Every 15 min, checks upcoming events

Get a research brief before every external meeting

An hour before any meeting with people outside your company, you get an email about who they are, recent news and what you last discussed.

Runs
Every 15 min, checks upcoming events
Apps
Gmail, Google Calendar
AI
Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
Access
Calendar read; Gmail gmail.modify (read + send)

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: an hour before any calendar meeting with external guests, research their company and recent news and email me a short brief, including our past emails.

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 sales lead has five or six calls a day with prospects, partners and customers. Preparing properly means looking up the company, skimming recent news and finding the last email thread, which takes fifteen minutes per meeting she does not have. Most days she walks in with only what she remembers.

This automation does the preparation for her. An hour before each external meeting, a short brief arrives in her inbox with the company background, anything newsworthy and a summary of past conversations.

What you get out of it

  • Walk into every meeting prepared

    Knowing about the prospect's recent funding round or new product makes for a better first five minutes and a more relevant conversation.

  • Pick up where you left off

    A summary of past emails reminds you what was promised, what was asked and where the deal stands.

  • Time back before each call

    The fifteen minutes of searching before each meeting is done for you, which adds up across a busy week.

  • Only for meetings that need it

    Internal meetings are skipped, so the briefs you get are always for conversations with people outside your company.

How it works

What happens, step by step

  1. Every 15 minutes ClickRuntime checks your Google Calendar for meetings starting in about an hour.

  2. It keeps meetings with guests from outside your company and skips any it has already briefed you on.

  3. It looks up each guest's company website, recent news and your past emails with that company.

  4. AI writes a short brief covering who they are, what is new and where things stand.

  5. The brief is emailed to you before the meeting starts.

Before it runs live

  • Connect Google through your own Google app (a one-time, 10-minute setup), so it works with your own Gmail
  • Connect Google Calendar

What you get

RunsEvery 15 min, checks upcoming events
Get a research brief before every external meetingtoday, 9:00Succeeded
Email · Meeting briefBrief: Intro call with Northwind Foods. Raised a Series A last month; last email from them asked for EU pricing.

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 Gmail and Google Calendar 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_meeting_research_brief_by_email.pyexample
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, state, notify, ai

MY_DOMAIN = "yourcompany.com"

@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 + timedelta(minutes=45)).isoformat(),
        timeMax=(now + timedelta(minutes=75)).isoformat(), singleEvents=True).execute().get("items", [])
    done = set(state.get("briefed") or [])
    gmail = build("gmail", "v1", credentials=creds, cache_discovery=False)
    for ev in events:
        domains = {a["email"].split("@")[1] for a in ev.get("attendees", []) if not a["email"].endswith(MY_DOMAIN)}
        if not domains or ev["id"] in done:
            continue
        dom = sorted(domains)[0]
        site = http.get(f"https://{dom}", timeout=10).text[:6000]
        news = http.get("https://news.google.com/rss/search", params={"q": dom}).text[:4000]
        ids = gmail.users().messages().list(userId="me", q=f"from:{dom} OR to:{dom}", maxResults=5).execute().get("messages", [])
        past = [gmail.users().messages().get(userId="me", id=m["id"]).execute()["snippet"] for m in ids]
        brief = ai.generate(["Write a short pre-meeting brief: who they are, recent news, where our conversation stands.",
                             site, news, "\n".join(past)], max_output_tokens=600).text
        notify.email_me(f"Brief: {ev.get('summary', dom)}", brief)
        done.add(ev["id"])
    state.set("briefed", list(done)[-200:])
    return {"meetings": len(events)}

FAQ

Common questions

How does it know which meetings are external?
It looks at the guests' email domains. Meetings where every guest uses your own company domain are skipped.
Where does the company information come from?
From the company's own website and recent news search results, plus your Gmail history with people at that domain.
Can I get the brief earlier than an hour before?
Yes. You can choose any lead time, such as the evening before or first thing in the morning for all of that day's meetings.
What permissions does it need?
Calendar read; Gmail gmail.modify (read + send). 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 (every 15 min, checks upcoming events). 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 every external meeting” from your assistant

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