Over the past year, I’ve regularly switched between the different LLMs for my day-to-day work to keep up with their evolution. While they’re quickly getting more capable, I feel their incredible value remains inaccessible to normal people.

I expect that over the next 6-12 months, we’ll see many companies focus on the experience layer that sits between the user and the LLM. This is where users have a clear path to this new value without needing to know the what the model is doing behind the scenes. As product builders and experience designers, this is our moment to shine!

I’ve trying to explore how companies are leveraging LLMs in their products - some more coherently than others - to get a handle on what’s possible. When done well, it can create a magical experience.

That’s how I felt when I first used Granola, which pitches itself as “The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings” and promises to “take your raw meeting notes and make them awesome.” I used the product quite heavily over the summer and it delivered on that promise for me.

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Getting started is easy - download their Mac app and connect it to your calendar. It uses the meeting’s audio to generate the transcription (vs. needing a bot to join the meeting) and works with the most popular meeting apps (Google, Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc.)

At the meeting’s start, the app creates a new note file where you can capture your own notes while it transcribes the meeting itself behind the scenes. Afterward, it generates a summary with section headers, speaker details, and your notes smartly woven in. You can of course review and edit everything.

The experience feels magical because you can let go of the urge to take copious notes and be more present in the conversation, only jotting down the most important things. The company offers many templates (1:1s, Customer Discovery, Stand-up, etc.) to inform how the AI will structure the notes.

I found a great use case not covered in their templates - transcribing and summarizing my conversations with my therapist. I’ve now got a summary of our past month’s discussions (and ongoing) to reflect on over time.

When I was in between jobs this summer, I could decide what meetings I wanted to use Granola for and it was fantastic. I also know that in corporate environments there is a lot more sensitivity around software like this so I wanted to learn how the company was positioning itself re: security and compliance and was directed to this FAQ (which has since been updated to reflect they’re working on an enterprise plan).

Granola isn’t the only company going after these space and the big entrenched enterprise players will clearly have an advantage. However, the Granola team have done an awesome job crafting a product that feels like magic focused on solving a very real problem for a lot of people and they recently raised $20 million to pursue that vision.