6 tips for drafting clearer briefings in less time

As every public servant will know, briefing notes have a difficult job. They need to turn complex information into something a busy decision-maker can understand quickly, without losing the context, caveats and evidence that matter.

That can make writing them surprisingly time-consuming. But in many parts of government, briefings are how things get done. The good news is that, according to executive speechwriter and former Canadian public servant Brent Kerrigan, there are simple tips that can speed up the process.

At Apolitical’s recent AI Skills Lab event on using AI for Better Briefings, Brent demonstrated how to organise information, identify what matters and spot problems earlier, and how AI can act as a thinking partner throughout the briefing process.

Here are some of the biggest lessons.

1. Start with the decision

Starting to write any briefing before you're clear about what the reader actually needs is a common mistake that can waste a lot of public servants’ time.

Brent suggested boiling every briefing down to three things: intention, context and authority.

• What does the reader need to understand, decide or approve?
• What do they need to know to do that?
• What is actually within their power to decide?

These three questions give you a filter for everything that follows. Instead of squeezing every interesting fact you've found into the document, you can concentrate your research and writing on the information that could actually affect the decision.

Briefing notes are at their best when they are clear and concise. More information doesn't necessarily make them more impressive or more useful.

2. Use AI to map the briefing before you start writing

AI can save significant time before you've written a single sentence.

Rather than staring at pages of research, notes and background information and working out how everything fits together yourself, Brent demonstrated using AI to create a briefing map.

A briefing map is essentially a structured overview of everything that needs to inform your note before you start drafting. It lays out the key points and evidence, alongside the limitations, risks, trade-offs, stakeholders and anything that still needs to be resolved.

That gives you a clearer route through the information and shows you what is still missing. By letting AI organise your notes into a neat plan, you can save a lot of time and write with full confidence.

3. Find gaps before they become rewrites

Few things are less efficient than getting halfway through a briefing, or all the way through it, before discovering that an important claim hasn't been verified.

And the good news is, this is another point where AI can help. Ask it to distinguish between what is known, what is properly sourced and what remains uncertain.

During the session, Brent deliberately based a recommendation on an impressive statistic that hadn't been legally cleared. The AI spotted the problem and challenged the recommendation before the briefing progressed.

That is potentially a much bigger time-saver than getting AI to draft a paragraph in ten seconds. Catching a shaky assumption early means less rewriting, fewer rounds of feedback and fewer unpleasant surprises when the note reaches a senior reader.

4. Stress-test your thinking

Once you've mapped the evidence, stress-test your thinking.

In Brent's workflow, it’s always the public servant making the key recommendation. You decide what to recommend and explain why.

But you can use AI to challenge the reasoning.

That distinction matters. You're not outsourcing the decision. You're using AI to ask the awkward questions before somebody else does.

It can expose contradictions, unsupported assumptions or trade-offs you've overlooked while there's still time to do something about them. The result should be a stronger briefing with fewer rounds of "Have we considered...?" coming back later.

5. Build a repeatable workflow

The efficiency gains become much bigger when you stop reinventing the process every time you have to write a briefing.

A great approach uses a repeatable sequence: check what information is safe to use, supply the source material, establish intention, context and authority, build a briefing map, identify gaps, make the human decision, challenge it, then move into writing.

You can adapt that workflow to your organisation, its preferred briefing format and the AI tools you're permitted to use.

With this, you can create a reliable process that gets you from raw information → organised evidence → tested recommendation → concise briefing with less friction each time.

6. Create a strong summary

Perhaps the most memorable efficiency lesson came from a story Brent shared about a team that spent hours carefully crafting a briefing note. They sent it to their executive, who promptly put the whole thing into an AI tool and asked for a summary.

Painful? Yes. But also instructive.

Busy readers have always skimmed briefings. AI simply gives them another way to compress them. So don't spend hours producing five pages when one useful page will do.

Put the decision up top, and keep important caveats next to the claims they qualify. Don't bury information that could change the decision, and remove anything the reader doesn't need.

In other words, make your briefing so focused that there's little left to summarise.

Watch the highlights video below for more from the session, or visit the event page to watch the full recording and explore the resources. You can also find the full speaker bio on the event page.

Interested in how AI can save you even more time on briefings? Launching October 2026, PolicyNova helps you model policy outcomes with sources you can stand behind, taking you from question to defensible brief in minutes, not months. Join the waitlist now and we'll send you a link when it launches!

This article was written with the help of AI using an anonymised transcript and edited by a human before publishing.