NotebookLM is the top AI tool you’re not using yet. I want to change that today.
It’s an excellent addition to your workflow because NotebookLM lets you air-gap information to reduce the risk of hallucinations and turns static sources into an interactive workspace. This enables you to learn faster, spot patterns sooner, and communicate your ideas in any way your audience requires.
Here’s how to level up your personal AI Operating System with NotebookLM’s latest features.
5 NotebookLM Use Cases to Add to your AI OS
1. Get Smart Fast – on Any Topic
Leaders can use NotebookLM to quickly assimilate large amounts of source material — such as entire books, long reports, or large PDFs — by generating briefings. These reports consolidate vast swaths of content into a single or two-page summary, allowing rapid consumption of key insights. Best of all, it minimizes fabrication by quoting your sources and linking back to them.
Bonus: The outputs can be tailored to your particular learning style, with Mind Maps and Video Overviews for visual learners, Reports for readers, and Audio Overviews for a quick refresh on your way to the meeting. This is the number one use case for the CEO of the first four-trillion-dollar company, by the way. So if you don’t want to take my word for it, listen to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.
Executive Move: Use NotebookLM to get up to speed on a company you’re considering applying to, for example. Upload their publicly available documents and then ask it questions about their strategy or financial performance.
Power Prompt: From these sources, produce a one-page brief with: top 5 insights, three red flags, three open questions, and page-linked citations.
2. Communicate Complex Ideas Quickly and Easily
Instead of manually preparing long presentations or lengthy documents, NotebookLM can automate content transformation for internal and external communication.
Audio Overviews are so 2024. Video Overviews are this year’s power use case. In addition to those audio summaries (essentially podcasts on demand), reports, and mind maps, you can now create quizzes, flashcards, and even visual overviews that generate narrated, slide-style explainers directly from your sources.
Executive Move: This is a cool tool for communicating the 2026 strategic plan to your leadership team, sending a weekly message to your sales team, or broadcasting a memo to frontline staff.
Power Prompt: Create a 90-second Video Overview from this strategic memo. Include direct quotes and figures with source call-outs.
3. Transform Your Voice Notes into Actionable Intelligence
We all have that person in our lives who insists on sending us voice notes instead of texting, don’t we? Those people seem to prefer communicating verbally rather than in written form. In that vein, I have a few friends who have fallen in love with Wispr Flow, an AI app that transforms your casual dictation into polished messages and even blog posts. One former CEO pal of mine vows to never “write” an email again now that this technology exists!
Many people reflect best in conversation. For these types of thinkers, NotebookLM can help you make sense of all your dictated insights.
People can upload their own voice notes (e.g., from an iPhone voice memo app) as audio files to create a notebook that they can converse with, helping them organize and recap their recorded thoughts. You can then ask it to make a mind map linking those seemingly disparate ideas, unlocking hidden patterns to what’s been on your mind lately.
Executive Move: The next time you have a long drive ahead of you, download all your ideas for your organization’s Q1 objectives for your Senior Leadership Team into a series of voice notes that you subsequently upload to NotebookLM. Then use the mind-mapping feature to link the concepts, the chat function to stress-test your ideas, and the Video Overview to turn it into a narrated presentation.
Power Prompt: Transcribe these audio files, cluster themes, and generate a mind map with links back to timestamps. Surface missing inputs for Q1 and propose owners.
4. Create an Index – for Anything
If NotebookLM is the best AI tool you’re not already using, its mind maps functionality is the best feature you’re missing out on.
Mind maps visually represent the hierarchy and content of a massive document or dozens of sources, serving as a visual table of contents or assets that can be dropped straight into presentations.
You effectively create a meta-index, similar to the one found at the back of a non-fiction book, incorporating the range of information sources you’ve provided, while combining it with a word cloud that transforms the data into a revealing image. Not only can you see the big picture of how the ideas connect, but you can also zoom in on any of the map’s “nodes” to dive into the details.
One legitimate complaint about AI tools is that they are making us dumber by doing the thinking we ought to be doing for ourselves. However, creating a mind map is not cognitive offloading; instead, it provides a new means of cognitive scaffolding. The ability to link disparate documents across media into a coherent, comprehensive, visual map is something our minds cannot do. This is a genuine instance where AI is extending your brain rather than shrinking it.
Executive Move: Do this for your Reading Pack in preparation for the upcoming Board of Directors meeting.
Power Prompt: Build a mind map that functions as a table of contents; add a legend and a ‘drill-down’ list of 10 must-read nodes with citations.
5. Build a “Virtual Board of Advisors.”
If you’re like me, you have a list of go-to thought leaders on a range of topics. I follow Ethan Mollick and Nate B. Jones on all things AI, and will read anything economist Kyla Scanlon writes about the Attention Economy. Wouldn’t it be cool to have them as your personal advisors?
I can’t afford to hire them, but I can upload their writing, YouTube videos, and interviews into a digital sounding board that I can query anytime. Whether you focus on one influential person in your life or a team of them, this use case can provide you with wise counsel whenever you need it.
Executive Move: Create a virtual version of your boss, biggest investor, or chairperson. Collect their email directives to you and presentations they’ve given, and you can build their digital twin to whom you can pitch and stress-test ideas before you propose them in real life.
Power Prompt: Given these sources from [X, Y, Z], simulate a panel. First list where they agree/disagree; then produce a consensus memo + dissenting footnotes, each with citations.
BONUS: Try Out One of Their Featured Public Notebooks
This is a great way to see the full potential of NotebookLM in action and an excellent source of wisdom (literally and figuratively).
Their Public Notebooks include:
- William Shakespeare: The Complete Plays
- The World in 2025 from The Economist: Tracking new developments in markets, science, technology, politics, and more, the annual “The World Ahead” issue from The Economist.
- How To Build A Life, from The Atlantic: This Notebook, based on The Atlantic’s “How to Build a Life” column by Arthur Brooks, explores ancient wisdom from Plato and other Greek philosophers.
To wit, I chose to explore the third one and asked: “What can Aristotle teach us about how to be happy in today’s world?”
You can also make one of your Notebooks public. For example, I’m currently writing a 10-part series on the central importance of Attention in business, politics, and life in 2025, and I will publish the collected essays of “The Attention Project” as a Public Notebook as a gift to my IoNTELLIGENCE community.
The 60-Second Shift:
- Get Smart Fast – on Any Topic
- Communicate Complex Ideas Quickly and Easily
- Transform Your Voice Notes into Actionable Intelligence
- Create an Index – for Anything
- Build a “Virtual Board of Advisors“ or Digital Version of Your Boss
- BONUS: Explore – or Publish – a Public Notebook
Closing Challenge
Incorporate one use case per week so that they become an organic part of your workflow.