Getting started with Miro AI in meetings
When I first tried Miro AI, I honestly thought it was just going to be like another auto note taker. But the first time I dropped it into a brainstorming workshop, it surprised me. Instead of just rehashing the same notes I already wrote, it threw in prompts that actually sounded like another person in the room was adding ideas. Some of them were totally useless — like it once suggested “paint the idea in blue” during a marketing session, which… okay? But other times it reframed what we said in a way that jogged our thinking, a bit like when somebody in the meeting repeats but slightly twists your words so you see it differently.
To turn it on, you don’t need a separate download or plugin. If your board has AI enabled, you just highlight text or sticky notes and use the “Ask AI” option from the little menu bar that appears above the selected content. That was confusing the first time because I expected some magical button at the top toolbar, not hidden inside selection. Once I found it though, the workflow made sense.
The first tip I learned early was to keep prompts short. If I tried to paste in half a paragraph, it would give generic filler. But if I used a phrase like “expand ways to market this product” it gave five or six different spins. That’s where it really shines — not automation for automation’s sake, but those nudges that help when a room full of people hits silence.
How idea expansion actually looks on screen
What happens visually is closer to how ChatGPT works than a sticky note app. When you click the expand option, it creates a little expansion block with multiple notes clustered together. They’re not scattered randomly — they appear grouped under the original sticky, almost like a family tree.
Here is what one of my sessions looked like when expanding the note “new user campaign”:
Original note: New user campaign
Expansion results:
– Create a welcome email journey
– Partner with influencers
– Offer small referral bonuses
– Host a virtual event
The results appear as fresh sticky notes with lighter colored backgrounds. That faded color is the only way to tell they were generated by AI, which is a small detail, but helpful because otherwise you’d quickly lose track of what was you and what was the tool. I didn’t notice this the first time and some teammates thought I had typed all of them myself really fast, which would have been impressive, but no.
Situations where Miro AI misunderstood context
The biggest frustration is when the tool takes your note way too literally. In one workshop we were talking about “launch calendar,” meaning product release schedule. The expansion gave us ideas like “create seasonal wall calendar” and “design holiday gift planner.” Everyone laughed, but that was obviously the wrong lane. It seems Miro AI doesn’t always know when a word like “calendar” means scheduling software versus buying a printed wall calendar at Target.
Another example — when we had a sticky note that said “rethink onboarding,” the expansion came back with “offer free snacks during orientation.” That might make sense for HR onboarding at an office, but we were talking about customer onboarding in software. You can’t give them snacks through the screen ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
So if you’re planning to rely on it heavily, you have to be willing to delete half the junk. It’s almost like fishing with a big net — you catch some junk with the good stuff, but if you’re patient the junk doesn’t matter.
Ways I integrated AI outputs into real workflows
In the middle of meetings, the last thing I want is to stop and manually drag notes around. What I started doing is using the expansion just once per cluster of ideas, then tagging the useful ones immediately. Miro lets you color code or add little emoji icons to stickies, so I would quickly mark AI generated notes I liked with green and ignore the rest. After the meeting, I’d clean them up and only copy the green-marked stuff into actual project lists.
Another trick: export to CSV. Not many people realize you can copy stickies out into spreadsheet format. That way, I can drop all of the meeting’s AI ideas into my Google Sheets backlog. From there, I use filters to sort by keyword (like “email” or “ads”). That makes it manageable instead of this messy digital board full of neon notes. 🙂
Comparing Miro AI expansion with human facilitation
I once ran a session without AI alongside a human facilitator and then another session with AI but no extra facilitator. The human facilitator was better at keeping conversation on track, no doubt. But what surprised me is that the AI version produced more unexpected options. Humans tend to stick within familiar lanes. For example, if you talk about “community engagement,” humans will mention social groups, Slack, or maybe events. But the AI threw in wildcards like “gamify participation” or “host online hackathons.” That was the sort of idea that wouldn’t have come up otherwise.
That said, humans excel at relevance. AI will never know if a hackathon makes zero sense for a company that sells kitchen cleaning supplies. So the sweet spot in my experience is letting AI throw spaghetti at the wall and then letting people decide which spaghetti was worth cooking.
How to set expectations with teammates
Honestly, the first time I introduced it to my team I undersold what it could do. I said, “it might give us prompts.” But by the end people were fighting over who got to highlight notes and hit expand. I realized you almost need to set the rule that not every output needs to stay. Otherwise the board fills up too quickly.
A quick system that worked for us:
– Round one: AI expansion session where everyone just generates notes
– Round two: group votes on which notes to keep
– Round three: convert winning notes into action steps
The voting feature in Miro was essential here. If we skipped voting, people argued over the value of random AI suggestions. By formalizing a process, people saw it not as facts but as suggestions.
Bugs and quirks I ran into while testing
Sometimes the AI expansion button just disappears. I had it working during one meeting, then re-opened the same board the next day and the option was gone. No error message, no explanation. The only fix I found was logging out of Miro, clearing browser cache, and signing back in. That’s annoying because you lose flow in the middle of a workshop. I saw a user in the Miro community forum post, “It’s there one day, gone the next.” Exactly my experience.
Another odd bug — occasionally it duplicates notes. Not the original one, but the expansion results. You’ll see two stickies with identical suggestions stacked on top of each other. It’s harmless, just clutter, but weird. Makes you wonder if the AI engine hiccuped or if Miro’s UI creates duplicates when it lags.
And one last quirk: if your note had multiple lines of text, the AI often reads only the first line. So if you wrote a note with more detail like:
“Improve welcome sequence
Include multi language support
Personalize by role”
The AI might only grab “Improve welcome sequence” and totally ignore the other two. That caught me off guard because I expected it to process full notes. Now I split long notes into separate stickies to avoid that problem.
Who will actually benefit most from it
For solo thinkers, honestly, I didn’t find it very inspiring. If you’re sitting alone in front of a blank board, the suggestions feel flat. But during group sessions, it took on a life of its own. People laughed, argued, highlighted things, and the AI gave us a mutual third party to bounce off. That’s where it adds real energy.
If your team already struggles to get ideas flowing, this could be the small spark you need. But if your team tends to explode with too many ideas already, this might just pile fuel on the fire. I wouldn’t use it in every meeting, but I’ve found that for brand brainstorming and campaign planning it regularly surfaces something worth keeping.
If someone asked whether Miro AI could replace a creative strategist — no. But can it make a strategy meeting feel less like pulling teeth? Yep, absolutely 😛
Where to find more reliable information
Since my own experiments didn’t always match the glossy descriptions, I ended up checking out the platform site itself at miro.com to see what they officially claim. They talk about structured brainstorming and expansion features, but what I found most valuable was other user discussions in forums, because those shared the quirks nobody writes in marketing copy. Reading those, I felt a little less alone seeing others complain about the disappearing AI button or irrelevant idea dumps.
The official page is useful for setup basics, but if you want the real scoop on whether it will make or break your meeting, you have to test it live with your own messy team dynamics. Nothing on the internet prepared me for the moment when AI seriously suggested, during a healthcare brainstorming session, “design fun cartoon characters for patients.” The silence in that room was unforgettable.