In short: An action item is a generic to-do (“review the proposal”). A commitment is a specific promise made by a specific person with a deadline (“Sarah will send the revised budget by Friday”). Most meeting tools only capture action items. Research shows 44% of those never get done — largely because no one owns them. Tracking commitments separately is the fix.
The Problem With Meeting Action Items
Every AI meeting tool on the market does roughly the same thing: transcribe the conversation, then extract a list of “action items.” The output looks like this:
- Review the Q3 proposal
- Update the design mockups
- Schedule a follow-up with the client
- Send the revised budget
Looks productive, right? Four items captured. But ask yourself: who is doing each of these? When are they due? And what happens if they don’t get done?
The answer, overwhelmingly, is nothing. Research from Bain & Company found that 44% of meeting action items are never completed. Not because people are lazy — because the items lack ownership, deadlines, and accountability.
What’s a Commitment?
A commitment is different from an action item in three ways:
| Action Item | Commitment | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Often unassigned | Specific person named |
| Deadline | Vague or missing | Explicit timeframe |
| Accountability | None built in | Person’s reputation at stake |
Here’s the same meeting, with commitments extracted:
- Sarah will send the revised budget by Friday
- James will schedule a follow-up with Acme Corp this week
- Design team will have updated mockups ready for Monday’s review
The first list is a set of hopes. The second is a set of promises. That distinction changes everything about whether work actually gets done.
Why No Meeting Tool Tracks This
Building a commitment tracker is harder than building an action item extractor. An action item is a pattern match — look for imperative sentences or phrases like “need to” and “should.” AI can do this with basic NLP.
A commitment requires understanding:
- Who made the promise (speaker identification)
- What specifically they promised (semantic extraction, not keyword matching)
- When it’s due (temporal reasoning)
- To whom the promise was made (conversational context)
This is why every competitor stops at action items. It’s the easy 80%. The remaining 20% — the commitments — is where follow-through actually lives.
What Happens After Extraction
Capturing commitments is necessary but not sufficient. The real value comes from what happens next:
- Calendar events created automatically for deadlines mentioned in commitments
- Email drafts prepared for follow-ups (“Hi Sarah, just checking in on the revised budget you mentioned sending by Friday”)
- Reminders scheduled so nothing falls through the cracks
- Accountability tracking across meetings — did Sarah actually send the budget?
This is the gap that Keptivo fills. Not just notes. Not just action items. Full commitment lifecycle tracking — from the moment someone says “I’ll do X by Y” to the moment it’s actually done.
The Bottom Line
Meeting notes capture words. Action items capture tasks. Commitments capture promises.
If 44% of your action items never get completed, the problem isn’t your team’s work ethic. It’s that nobody is tracking the difference between what needs to happen and what people actually promised to do.
Join the Keptivo waitlist to be first to try commitment tracking that actually works.