This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss

Productivity Granola CEO Chris Pedregal on invisible AI bots, the coming fight over who sees your transcripts, and why he turns down the companies that ask for them This podcast mentions Anthropic a few times; my fiancé works there. See my full ethics disclosure here.Last week on the Platformer podcast, Raycast’s Thomas Paul Mann predicted that within a few years, as much as half the apps on your Mac could be ones you made yourself. For the third episode of our miniseries on work in the AI era, I wanted to learn more about a tool that may already know more about your job than any other: the AI notetakers that increasingly listen to every meeting we take.And so this week I talked to Chris Pedregal. Pedregal is the co-founder and CEO of Granola, which has been my own AI notetaker since shortly after it launched. Pedregal started the company after a long tenure at Google, which he joined as an associate product manager in 2008. He left the company after a few years to start Socratic, a homework-helper app that Google acquired in 2018. In 2022, he left again to play around with the pre-ChatGPT large language models from OpenAI, and soon he and co-founder Sam Stephenson went on to launch Granola.In an ocean of chatbot products, Granola is the rare AI tool with real product polish. Granola captures the audio from your own computer, lets you type your own notes alongside the AI, and fills in the gaps with an instant AI summary as soon as the meeting ends. (The app’s surprisingly good summaries were ultimately what prompted me to become a paying customer.) The company was most recently valued at $1.5 billion.Unlike some rivals, Granola is invisible to the person at the other end of the call — something that has generated some controversy among workers who are leery of being secretly surveilled. Pedregal told me the design is an artifact of how difficult other meeting software make it for third-party bots to join conversations, and walked me through the lengths Granola now goes to in order to disclose itself — displaying an animated watermark on your video feed through a virtual camera, since Zoom and Google Meet offer no better way to ask a room for consent. Pedregal also made a prediction that may chill some privacy-conscious workers: "I think we'll probably end up in a world where in work meetings, the expectation is that you are being transcribed by default, and you ask not to be transcribed."Pedregal shared some product news on the show as well: Granola, which has never stored audio recordings, is now researching whether to automatically delete verbatim transcripts after some period of time, while compressing the contained knowledge into a working memory. The company is also prototyping "enhanced transcripts" built for AI agents to use as part of a corporate knowledge base. But what struck me most was Pedregal’s attitude toward actual surveillance. Granola notes are private by default, and "companies hate us for this," he told me. CEOs regularly ask for access to every employee transcript, and Granola refuses. "If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards," Pedregal said.When I asked my standard question about the risk of AI job loss, Pedregal — who runs a company of around 80 people, and could see it reaching no more than 120 — played down maximalist predictions of labor disruption. "People thought when the computer came out, we'd have lots of leisure — and no, the opposite happened," he said. As for the seven other apps that now offer to take notes every time I start a meeting, he is unbothered: "I think we are, like, 5 percent into this new technical revolution," he told me. Transcription, in his view, is merely the word processor of this era: "Spreadsheets haven't come out yet. The GUI hasn't come out yet." The real fight, he says, is over what interface we'll all be working in a decade from now.In some ways Pedregal’s project reminds me of the original version of Slack — a company whose name is an acronym describing its onetime vision to become a “searchable log of all conversation and knowledge.” Granola is building a log not unlike that one. The question now is whether it can become as essential to the modern workplace as Slack has — or whether, by letting you grant AI agents access to your conversations via MCP connectors, it risks giving away the game to OpenAI or Anthropic.A long excerpt of our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length. Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton. And let us know what you think — we welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.Casey Newton: I find myself using Granola for everything, but maybe searching through my notes less than I expected to. I get a lot of peace of mind from capturing everything, but it turns out I don't really need to check back for what this one person said. How true does that prove across your user base?Chris Pedregal: I go back less than you'd expect I would, and some companies would look at that and say, okay, how do we drive that number up? I actually think forgetting — not going back and looking at stuff — is a feature as much as a bug. Our brains are actually pretty decent at remembering the most important things. What's powerful is that moment when you're like, ah, crap — what did I say in that meeting? Just knowing that you have it is very valuable.The thing that has changed: our MCP usage is the fastest-growing chart that we have, and agents have a lot more cycles, so agents do go back and look at stuff. I think that trend will only increase. Transcripts are this goldmine of context. Out of the box, agents are really intelligent, but they know nothing about you. And it turns out we do tons of meetings, and speaking is pretty effortless. There's this context exhaust that you're naturally putting out, and something like Granola just captures it.Newton: I want to ask you about a design choice you made that I think is very powerful, but that people also have feelings about, which is that Granola is invisible. There had been other AI notetakers before, and often they would involve adding a bot to a meeting. How did you come to a place where you said, we're just going to record the audio off of a laptop?Pedregal: The reason we made that decision was not so that Granola was hidden. I really don't like bots, but that wasn't the original goal. The original goal was that we thought it was really important for Granola to always work. It didn't matter if you were in a Slack huddle or a Zoom meeting or an in-person meeting: if you hit start, it just starts transcribing. And the only way to do that is by using the system audio on your computer. We also didn't like bots because we thought they're a really inelegant, dehumanizing force in a meeting.The downside of our approach, though, is that when you use Granola out of the box, other people don't know you're using it. So we're placing the onus on the user to tell others that they're using Granola. And that's actually not our choice. If there were an easy way that didn't involve a bot to make that visible, we would do it — that's where social norms are going anyway, and it's just good for everybody to know whether you're being transcribed or not. The problem is that the Zooms and the Meets of the world make this almost impossible, because they're pushing their own note-taking systems. There's no API call where we could ask everyone in a meeting for consent — we would do that. So we've had to go to some crazy lengths. I can show you what we built: if I turn on Granola right now, do you see this watermark that shows up at the bottom of my screen?[Pedregal turns on Granola, and a small animated Granola watermark appears on his video feed.]Pedregal: This is something we built, and users can turn it on. Any company that rolls out Granola tends to want this on, because they want visibility. But the way we had to build it was kind of nuts. This is actually a virtual camera on your computer, and we are injecting this into the video feed before it hits the Zooms or the Google Meets out there, because that's the only way we can control how it shows up and make sure it shows up.I do think social norms are going to evolve, I think the video conferencing platforms are going to give us more control, and I think we'll end up in a good place. I think we'll probably end up in a world where in work meetings, the expectation is that you are being transcribed by default, and you ask not to be transcribed. I hope that in social environments, the default continues to be that you're not being transcribed, and you ask to transcribe.Newton: It sounds like you've basically accepted the privacy critique.Chris Pedregal: It's something that's been on our mind from the beginning. Another design choice we made — unlike, I think, anybody at the time — is that we never stored the audio. We have access to the audio, we could have access to the video, and we never, ever stored the audio, because we wanted Granola to feel like a notepad. At first, we were actually going to delete the transcripts: you'd get the notes, and then we'd delete the transcript. We realized we shouldn't do that — the transcripts are super valuable, and if you want to regenerate your notes, you need the original source material.Every time a new technology comes up, you have to be thoughtful around the design choices you make, and then society will adapt. I'm very glad we decided not to store the audio — that was the right call. Right now we're looking into whether we should delete the transcript automatically after a certain amount of time for all users. There's a lot of value there that's lost, so we're doing research into compressing it. You probably don't need a verbatim transcript of a conversation you had three years ago, but you might want to still go back and chat with that meeting. There's usefulness and invasiveness, and you need to thread the needle between those two, so you get as much usefulness for the least amount of invasiveness.Newton: Last question on this point: I recently read a story in the Wall Street Journal that at least one startup founder is using Granola to record her first dates and then have Claude analyze them. Is that a recommended use for Granola?Pedregal: No. I mean — if they're consenting adults, then go for it, ideally with everyone okay with it. But no, it's not a recommended use. We have built Granola for the work use case. A lot of people are interested in the always-on wearable thing in your social life or personal life. That's not what we're interested in doing. But I wonder if Claude gives good dating advice. I don't know. I've been married for a while, so maybe it could give me good marriage advice.Newton: Let's talk about agents. I've been using Granola for well over a year now, so it knows a lot of things about me. What are some things you're thinking about being able to do with that, and how do agents get involved?Chris Pedregal: I think it's a little bit harder today than it should be. You can connect Granola to Claude, or go into the chat in Granola, and ask questions that reference that context. But if you've used Granola for any reasonable amount of time, there's just too much context to search quickly. So Claude will do a relatively dumb job at extracting information — it'll look at the 20 most relevant meetings. But really, what I think we should do is compress that down into apple juice from concentrate. We should have that concentrate — that compressed information about Casey — ready, and that's what should be sent to all the other tools and systems and agents.So we're in this awkward phase right now where we have all the context, but it's not yet in the form that's most useful. And then — what do you use it for? It's basically black and white. Either you've realized that you can use AI to help you do a lot of things — maybe most things — in which case the critical piece is that the AI needs to have the right context. Or you haven't.Newton: Before we hopped on today, I asked Granola to give me a critique of my meeting style, and it said: you sometimes let others set the agenda too much — which is a very polite way of saying that I get bored in meetings and stop paying attention. But it's absolutely true. That's a useful piece of information for me, but I don't think the best form factor for that is me going in and asking Granola. It feels like it wants to be something more proactive.Pedregal: 100 percent. We're in the phase right now where, if you put in a bunch of work, you can create these workflows and make use of the context. But it's not in a state where your average person will just get value out of it. Here's an example: we launched this thing a little while ago called pre-meeting briefs. Granola will write a little brief before you have a meeting with an external person. It's one of the most obvious use cases, right? Anyone who's AI-native has gone into Claude or Cursor or Codex and set up a daily thing that looks at their upcoming meetings and writes them a little "what I should know." It's easy to set something up. It's actually kind of a pain in the ass to make it good. Ours still needs a lot of work, but it's a lot better than what most people had set up for themselves, I guarantee you.And that's just going to happen with everything. Right now, things are technically possible, but the bar to do them is just too high for most people. That's why it's an exciting time to build product. If you think about the 50 most common use cases that are done with AI, I don't think those should be individuals prompting AI, going into a chat and typing. I think that should be productized, and it should be proactive. But those things are always harder than they sound at first.I'll tell you some of the things we've figured out so far. One is that people don't really want another inbox of shit they need to do. You already have a lot of to-do lists — your personal to-do lists, your email inbox, Slack, maybe Twitter DMs for you. If all you're doing is adding another place of things I need to check, of work I need to do — I don't know if that's really adding to people's lives. I already feel pretty overwhelmed and stressed out in my work environment. I don't need Granola to make me feel more stressed out about the things I'm not going to get to.And then another paradoxical thing: oftentimes, we've found that AI is almost most useful with the smaller tasks rather than the bigger ones. The most important things going on — you're probably thinking about them already, and there's not that much for AI to do. But writing this person a thank-you note because they were really kind: maybe you just wouldn't get to it normally. But if AI says, here, I wrote it for you — do you want it? — then you're like, oh, thank you. I feel like I'm a better person; I sent that person a thank-you note. At the end of the day, I think it's all about what the AI can surface proactively, and doing that in a way that's not overwhelming, not distracting, not intimidating, not dumb. That's the name of the game.Newton: I wanted to ask you one more thing about all this context that you're gathering on people. When Granola is applied in a big company, you're developing something that sort of looks like psychological profiles of the entire organization. I wonder if there are lines there where it felt like: let's not do that. That might feel creepy, or this might not be good for the company.Pedregal: It's something we think about a lot. In the same way that we decided not to store the audio, the other really non-obvious thing that we did is that all Granola notes are private by default — you're the only person who has access to them. Companies hate us for this — they're like, hey, there's all this content; why am I paying you money? And we're like, no. We're capturing context, but context can be very private, very sensitive, very nuanced. So even though your company's paying for it, those notes are private. Legally, if the company gets sued, we have to hand those notes over — it's the same thing with Gmail. But it's not like your manager, or your manager's manager, can look at those notes or run an agent on them. There are some real trade-offs for us as a company in doing that, and it's something we believe in.I don't think the line in the future will be drawn so much on whether something should be transcribed or not. The interesting questions will be: should this context be shared, and what part of this context should be shared? Say you have a one-on-one. It can be very valuable, at least for me, to ask: what exactly did I talk about last time? How can I improve? Other people probably shouldn't have access to that. But maybe you have a really open culture and you want to proactively share it — that's cool. There needs to be human judgment and philosophy in how you do that.And here's the bit that's going to get really interesting. A classic use case for Granola is sales calls. If you're doing a sales call, having great notes and great transcripts is really valuable. Right now, you can either choose to share the notes and the transcript with other people or not. Something we're working on is that you can modify what version of it gets shared. We'd like to strip out all PII — all personal information. We'd like to strip out any conversations about your health or your family. Those are still valuable to you. Say we were friends: I might still want to remember — crap, what's Casey's kid's name? But I don't need my work colleagues to know that. The nuances of human relationships and how we work really matter, and the tools we design need to fit into all these different situations.Newton: I think you could probably use Granola pretty easily to figure out who is a bad manager at a company. Or, as an employee, being able to ask Granola: hey, I'm being treated in this way, and this doesn't really seem great. Does that feel like an opportunity to you, or is that something that stresses you out?Pedregal: I think it's an opportunity if it's bottoms-up, and I think it stresses me out if it's top-down. If you're saying, I don't think my manager is very good — help me navigate how I should work with my manager — I think that's great. I think it's empowering. CEOs will ask us all the time, saying: I want everyone at my company using Granola, and I want access to all the transcripts and all the notes to run the queries that you're talking about. And we say no. That's not what the tool is built for. You can set that up if you want, but then you have to create a company culture and set an expectation, and everyone needs to share their notes and understand what they're getting into. But there's no backdoor way. I think that's a slippery slope. If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards.Newton: Granola was a classic case, in my view, of someone having a really good idea and the entire industry racing as fast as it could to copy it. So what do you tell your venture capitalists to convince them that you can build a moat here and make something really durable around this kind of core product?Chris Pedregal: I'm always afraid this will sound like bullshit to people who don't know me, but basically, I think we are like 5 percent into this new technical revolution. It's like the personal computer just dropped, and no one really knows what to do with it, and the only thing you can do right now is word processing — which is powerful. But spreadsheets haven't come out yet. The GUI hasn't come out yet. I feel like we're in that moment in history, and transcription and meeting notes feel like the first little thing that's useful.And the future — what's ahead of us — is the prize: how can these new tools actually change the way you work, and make you do better work, faster, smarter? Augment you to do more than you can do today. Every big company is also chasing after that, so it's going to be super competitive. We just happened — I think through luck — to stumble upon transcription as one of the most valuable data sources for that future, and that's why everyone's going after it. The short answer is: if all we were going to be is a transcription and meeting-notes company, then I'd be really worried. But to me, the battle is much bigger, and it's ahead of us. So I'm worried about that future world, not today's existing world.Newton: And what is that battle ahead?Pedregal: In short: there will be a few apps that people use all day, every day. For the last 50 years, those have probably been docs, spreadsheets, email — then Slack came on the scene. It's been a very consistent set of apps. And all of that's about to change. I don't think it'll be one app. I might be wrong — maybe we'll all just be living inside ChatGPT or Claude. I don't think so. But I don't think it's going to be 50, either. As AI gets smarter and agents get smarter, there's basically a fight for what is the interface that people are using day in and day out to get work done. That's what we're fighting for.Newton: Here's where I'll make my disclosure that my fiancé works at Anthropic, so people should consider that accordingly. You have connectors now to both Claude and ChatGPT, so you can use Granola headless — browse your old meetings through a chatbot, ask questions that way. That makes you this memory layer for somebody else's agent. Does that feel like a comfortable place for you?Pedregal: I wasn't sure for a long time. On one hand, I was like: we have this amazing context that no one else really has. Should we be giving that away? And on the other hand: the whole point of that context is that it should make everything better, and you should be able to use it however you want.And then, in November, December of last year, when Claude Code came out and everyone kind of lost their minds, it just became incredibly obvious to me that there are so many things people are going to want to be able to do, and that context just makes all of that stuff better. We should absolutely make it as easy as possible for people to use that context however they want. That said, there are some use cases that are very meeting-adjacent where we should be not a little bit better — we should be 10x better than anyone else, and better than anything you could vibe-code yourself.I'll give two examples — two use cases from the same individual. I talk to a lot of users, and when possible, I try to go into their office and actually watch them work. One: this woman had set up pre-meeting briefs on Claude, and once we launched ours, she turned hers off, because she's like: yours are better, and I don't need to maintain this thing. And then the other thing she did blew my mind. She was in sales, and whenever she met with a client, she would build them a microsite — a website that followed the brand guidelines of that client's company, with all these interactive graphs, and all the content was based off of Granola transcripts from her conversations with them. And I was like: oh yeah, it would never make sense in a million years for Granola to try to be building websites. That's not a thing we're going to be able to compete against. We should power the context behind that. But things that are very meeting-related — getting ready for a meeting, pulling out the right insights from a meeting, following up with folks — where the interface really matters: that's where we should fight really hard to own the experience, because I think we can do a good job at it.Newton: The thing you had me thinking about is actually not a memory layer so much as it is an identity layer. I can see a version of Granola where I'm volunteering that context. I'd say: hey, anybody who comes into a meeting with me, here's what they need to know — I'm going to be bored after 10 minutes. I'm comfortable sharing that, and I'm opting into doing it.Pedregal: It's a little bit different, but here's something I did for a while. I had this recipe which, every night, would write a three-page summary of me — who I am, who I work for, what I'm trying to achieve, what are my goals and challenges — all of it just based off of my Granola transcripts. And then I would upload that to Claude or ChatGPT as context for any query I did. Because — sorry to say bad things about Anthropic —Newton: No, please. Whenever we talk negatively about Anthropic, it builds my credibility. So go nuts, Chris.Chris Pedregal: What is considered memory thus far is just so superficial. Maybe it knows my wife's name is Patty, but it misspells it — that kind of thing. Whereas intelligent compression of context and memory into a useful form is super valuable. An idea we've been playing around with: agents, for whatever reason, love looking at transcripts. So we're playing around with this idea of what if we created an enhanced transcript that was built for agents. If you use an internal product name, like a project name, it would spell out what that project is. Or if I say "Sam," it would say: oh, you probably mean Sam Stephenson, the designer, not Sam Garson, the engineer — and connect it to their email. If you could build this artifact for agents, it could be really rich with contextual information. It's an exciting time to be building. All this is changing.Newton: One of the things that I've been asking everybody about on this podcast is AI and jobs. I'm curious if AI has changed the way you think about hiring at Granola. Are you a smaller company than you might be otherwise, or not really?Pedregal: I've always been biased towards the smaller-company thing. I worked at Google, and I had a small startup, and the benefits you gain from a small group of people who are aligned and trust each other — they can just do so much. I've been biased in that direction to a fault — to the point where we had product-market fit with Granola and it was growing really quickly, and I still didn't want to hire, and I really backed us into a corner. That was really bad. So now we're hiring. I don't know if AI has changed my views. We're like 70 to 80 people, somewhere in there, and I could see us getting to 100, 120 — but after that, maybe that's it. Let's see how the world feels at that point.I find the conversations that people have about how there'll be no big companies, or you won't need people — I think it's kind of silly, personally. New technologies appear, and it changes the work we do and the jobs that exist. But people in America seem to be working as much as they ever have been, right? People thought when the computer came out, we'd have lots of leisure — and no, the opposite happened. And then I think: well, if you're managing a bunch of agents — let's say you can manage X agents, and if you hire another person, you could manage 2X agents, and you make more money — do you want to hire that person? Maybe. I don't know. We can sit around and navel-gaze a bit, but I don't think we're going to get it right. Things are going to change, but ultimately I think humans are at the core of everything, and I don't think that's going to change.Newton: I do think there is a version of the future where none of this manages to give anyone any time back at all. We have AI writing more briefings and emails and generating slide decks and notes for other people's AI to summarize, and we don't seem any more productive than we were before any of this started. So how do we avoid that, Chris? And can Granola help?Pedregal: I'll avoid your question with something related but slightly different. I think the reason we work a lot is more systemic. It's cultural. It's the pressures that are placed on us by the work environments that we're in, and how ambitious we are. My hope is that better tools can elevate what we spend our time doing while we work. Let's say we work just as much, but we do fewer rote tasks and more deep thinking about what the right thing to do is. In a world where agents get really good — and we don't know how good agents are going to get — I don't think meetings are going anywhere. In some ways, meetings are actually powerful, because it's where humans come together and ask: what do we actually care about? What do we believe? That can feel really mundane and dumb — a Monday meeting where you're talking. But it can also be pretty profound.But I don't know if that means we're going to work less. I think history is against us here. Technology that's supposed to save us time just ends up with people working more, and I don't know what's up with that. Maybe one exception: I think notifications and apps and tools have really fucked us, and our ability to focus and think and be present. We've become very reactive. I really hoped Apple, or Google, would have the moral imperative to say: oh yeah, we built this the wrong way. I'm sorry — let's try this again. But it's almost impossible to do that as a big company. Maybe AI can help us with that, or at least give individuals agency to better deal with the onslaught of notifications. I think if you took someone from 50 years ago and you showed them how our brains flit from one thing to another because these little red circles show up on screens, they'd be horrified. Absolutely horrified. It's probably not a satisfying answer. What do you think? You've asked a lot of people this question.Newton: I have a slightly skewed sample, because I mostly talk to people who like their jobs — and people who like their jobs work more, and actively seek out tools to help them find more things to do. For folks who only like their job sometimes, but mostly want to not think about it too much and get home to their families: I worry that AI mostly just feels oppressive to them. It's a new system to learn. It's a new system of monitoring and control. And I think this shows up in the survey data about how people are feeling about AI. So my hope is that AI tool makers keep that person in mind and think: what can I do for you, a person who has a normal relationship with your job, that is maybe going to make you feel less overwhelmed?Pedregal: I think that's a great point. Tools are the reason humans can do what they've achieved. There's an amazing quote, which is: we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. And I think in the age of AI, it's really important: does AI feel like it is my tool — meaning I control it, and it makes me better — or is it the company's tool, or the government's tool, or the system's tool? In which case, it feels completely different. And the irony's not lost on me, because we are a tool that individuals use, but that, for the most part, companies pay for. So we make sure the notes are yours and private, and we want Granola to feel like the most personal AI, but in the workplace.I really do think thoughtful design of the tools we create matters. It's the same way people stopped going to libraries and started Googling everything. In some ways, that was great, because information was accessible really quickly. The downside is that humanity is now learning a lot of stuff from SEO-optimized, crappy content, as opposed to well-researched work. That's not what Larry and Sergey wanted to happen — their motivation was: let's make information accessible and useful. But that's a weird consequence of the tool they built. And I think the unintended consequences of the design decisions we make around AI tools might be really, really big. So — good luck to all of us, I guess.Newton: Good luck to all of us.A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORInnovate at speed with JiraJira by Atlassian is built for AI-native software development.The Teamwork Graph feeds agents context from across your entire stack, delivering 44% more accurate results.So you can equip every agent, team, and teammate in your org with the context they need to run faster in the same direction.Learn More.Those good postsFor more good posts every day, follow Casey’s Instagram stories.(Link)(Link)(Link)Talk to usSend us tips, comments, questions, and Granola recipes: casey@platformer.news. Read our ethics policy here.