Why NotebookLM could become your next hub for all your work
This might have been Google’s plan all along. The Gemini-powered RAG for all your research, work, and data.
I think NotebookLM might be the most under-appreciated and under-utilized AI tool we have right now; and I’m including myself in there too. I’ve talked about it. I’ve taught about it. I’ve shown how amazing it is for gathering research. But really using it? Not really.
It sits there pinned in my Dock, but do I have it open to use? Is it my first stop when I want to work on a project?
Nope.
But when I read this announcement from Google with some much needed and long overdue enhancements to NotebookLM, something just…clicked. I think we just saw the first hint at what Google sees NotebookLM’s real purpose is.
NotebookLM is intended to be our new dashboard into work, projects, and information. NotebookLM will become the central place to unify everything in your Google Workspace.
I saw a tip from Christopher S. Penn a while back that made the lightbulb go off. He suggested taking the source URLs from a Gemini Deep Research report—or any deep research you’ve done—and dumping them directly into NotebookLM. Then, you add the full report itself. Now you aren’t just reading a summary; you have a direct line to query the source materials yourself.
I tried it yesterday on a project regarding AI training for small businesses. It worked. I now have an interactive view into the research. And it got me thinking that we’re all looking at NotebookLM the wrong way.
NotebookLM friction is fading away
Getting stuff into NotebookLM hasn’t been…fun. It couldn’t deal with Word files. It couldn’t even handle Sheets or Slides well. And if you’re like me and have hundreds and hundreds of (often poorly named—thank you Gemini to Docs export defaults) documents, finding the right files to add was a royal pain.
With this latest announcement from Google Labs, that friction is decreasing. Pasting links to Google Drive files, adding Google Sheets, adding Word documents directly—changes everything. It hints at a tool that you can use as your own Gemini-powered document store (RAG) and library.
What if you could integrate everything about a project—outside data sources, GA4 reports, project plans, PM tools, documentation, presentations—into a single place that’s more than “here’s where all the stuff is” into “here’s where we can get more work done?” What if it became the portal to Google Drive and all the tools Google has at your fingertips from Search Console to GA4? What if you could build something in Opal or Google Cloud to run research or gather data and return it directly into NotebookLM?
And that’s exactly what I think we should be doing. I think this is where NotebookLM is headed.
Your new information dashboard
We need to stop thinking of NotebookLM as just a place to summarize a PDF and start thinking of it as a dynamic project hub.
Imagine starting a notebook for your next marketing campaign. You dump in all your Deep Research on the target audience (with sources separated and ingested). You add your competitor analysis. Add the Content Audit you did with recommendations, competitors, and goals. You load in images of past campaigns. You have the Brand Style Guides. Now, instead of always jumping from place to place to place looking for all the documents spread out over lord knows where; you have a single “lens” focused entirely on that project.
You have a tool to ask:
- Does this new copy match our persona? Based on the competitor research, what’s the gap we’re missing?
- Does this new research change how we should approach our copy?
- Our competitor just launched this new creative for their campaign, how does this align with buyer personas?
It becomes a dashboard for your project and your brain.
The 20-year quest for the “Second Brain”
This touches on something I’ve been obsessed with for over 20 years: Knowledge Management (KM). We’ve always strived for that “Second Brain”—a truly useful way to hold all the things you need to know about a project or topic and access it exactly when you need it. But, frankly, KM sucks.
If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, you know the eldritch horror of SharePoint. If you think of SharePoint as more than a file share, but also as a KM tool and you’ve heard the dreaded words “oh that’s in Sharepoint…,” know you’re going to lose hours trying to figure out where the files are. Which space, which group, do I have permissions, is this file out of date?
It has all the files. You can search for them. But it gives you a view into everything all at once. It’s a data dump. It’s overwhelming. What we need isn’t access to everything. We need a filter. A better filter.
We need something tuned to what we’re doing right now, not everything. We need a lens for one project and one for this (very different) project. It needs to be one part repository and one part discovery engine (because we know there are always important bits we’ve missed that should be surfaced for us).
The Agentic Future
This is where I see NotebookLM going. Right now we have to add all the sources manually. Yes, the “Discover” option is there, but we have to still sift through things. But imagine a future update—and I’m betting this is on the roadmap—where NotebookLM acts agentically.
Imagine if it didn’t just hold the data you gave it, but dynamically went out and suggested new information and sources as the project evolved? It becomes a living project manager/researcher that grows alongside your work. Imagine if it could tap into GA4 in real time and dynamically give you insight into your website, content, or campaign.
I think NotebookLM could become a killer app that changes how we work with information. It bridges the gap between the chaos of the internet (and our terrible file organization) and the structure we need to actually get work done.
But I’m curious—are you using it? Is it part of your daily workflow, or is it just another tab you have open that you mean to get to eventually? If you are using it, what has been your best win? Let me know in the comments.
Originally published at https://trishusseywriting.substack.com/p/why-notebooklm-could-become-your
