This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss

In the latest episode of Platformer's miniseries on work in the AI era, reporter Casey Newton spoke with Chris Pedregal, co-founder and CEO of Granola, an AI notetaker. Pedregal, who previously worked at Google and founded Socratic, launched Granola after experimenting with pre-ChatGPT large language models from OpenAI. Granola differentiates itself with its polished product and ability to capture audio from a user's computer, allowing users to type their own notes alongside AI-generated summaries.

Unlike some competitors, Granola is not visible to the other party during calls, making it a controversial choice for privacy-conscious workers. Pedregal explained that Granola's design is due to the difficulty of third-party bots joining conversations on popular meeting platforms. The company is exploring the possibility of automatically deleting transcripts after a certain period and creating enhanced transcripts for AI agents to use in corporate knowledge bases.

However, Pedregal expressed his concern about surveillance and the potential for AI job loss, stating that companies often request access to employee transcripts, which Granola refuses to provide. He compared the current state of AI tools to the early days of the computer, predicting that transcription is merely the beginning of a new technical revolution in the workplace.