A specific, owned task that emerges from a meeting and requires follow-up work afterwards. A well-formed action item names a single owner, describes the outcome (not the activity), and includes a due date. AI meeting copilots extract action items by listening for commitment language — "I'll send that over by Friday," "Can you ping the design team?" — and surface them in the post-call recap so nothing is lost between the call and the follow-up email. Action items differ from decisions (which record what was agreed) and from open questions (which capture what's still unresolved). The most common failure mode is action items with no owner, or owners with no due date — both of which guarantee the item will resurface in next week's meeting with no progress.