Granola: The AI that Protects Privacy in Business

The Growing Impact of AI Note-Takers

In a world where technology is evolving at breakneck speed, artificial intelligence tools, particularly AI note-takers, are becoming increasingly important in our professional lives. During a recent appearance on the Platformer podcast, Thomas Paul Mann from Raycast made a bold prediction: in a few years, up to 50% of the applications on our Mac computers could be personal creations. This perspective highlights the growing impact of AI tools, especially those that assist our meetings by capturing notes automatically.

This week, the spotlight is on Granola, an AI note-taker that stands out for its unique approach to privacy. Chris Pedregal, co-founder and CEO of Granola, shared his journey and the philosophy behind his company. After working at Google, where he started in 2008 as an associate product manager and founded Socratic, a homework help app acquired by Google in 2018, Pedregal launched Granola in 2022 with Sam Stephenson. Their goal: to explore large language models before the era of ChatGPT.

Granola: An Innovative and Discreet AI Tool

Granola distinguishes itself in a saturated market of chatbots thanks to its sleek design and advanced features. The application captures audio directly from the user's computer, allowing for manual note-taking in parallel and providing an instant summary at the end of each meeting. This ability to deliver accurate summaries has convinced many users to become paying customers. Granola recently reached an impressive valuation of $1.5 billion.

Unlike some competitors, Granola operates discreetly, without alerting other meeting participants. This invisibility has raised concerns about secret surveillance. Pedregal explains that this design stems from the limitations of existing meeting software, which complicates the integration of third-party bots. To address this, Granola displays an animated watermark on the user's video feed, an innovative solution to obtain participant consent.

Privacy at the Heart of Granola

Granola stands out for its commitment to user privacy. The notes generated by the application are private by default, an approach that does not sit well with all companies. According to Pedregal, businesses dislike Granola for this privacy policy. CEOs regularly request access to every employee's transcription, but Granola refuses to comply with these demands. He believes that allowing such use of personal data would go against the company's ethics.

Pedregal envisions a future where business meetings are transcribed by default, with the option for participants to opt out. He hopes that in social contexts, transcription will remain optional, thus preserving individuals' privacy.

Towards Ethical Data Management

Granola is currently exploring the possibility of automatically deleting verbatim transcriptions after a certain period while retaining essential knowledge in a working memory. This approach aims to balance the utility of data with privacy protection. The company is also testing "enhanced transcriptions" designed for use by AI agents within a corporate knowledge base.

Pedregal emphasizes the importance of designing privacy-respecting technologies from the ground up. Granola has never stored audio recordings, a decision that reflects its commitment to privacy. The company continues to seek ways to compress data to reduce the long-term impact of retaining transcriptions.

The Future of AI Note-Takers

Pedregal remains optimistic about the future of AI note-takers. He downplays fears of major disruptions to the job market due to AI, reminding us that the advent of computers did not lead to the hoped-for reduction in working hours. According to him, transcription is just the beginning of a broader technological revolution, with new work interfaces on the horizon.

Granola, with its ethical and innovative approach, could well become an essential tool in the modern professional landscape, much like Slack. However, the challenge will be to maintain this balance between utility and respect for privacy while navigating a constantly evolving technological environment.

Pedregal currently leads a company of about 80 people, with potential growth up to 120 employees. He expressed his belief that we are only at 5% of this new technical revolution, comparing transcription to the era of word processors before the arrival of spreadsheets and graphical interfaces.

Chris Pedregal Explains His Choices

Capturing everything brings peace of mind, even for people who almost never reread their notes. Asked whether that holds true across Granola's user base, Chris Pedregal says he goes back to his own notes less than one might think. Some companies, he notes, would look at that figure and wonder how to increase it. He takes the opposite view: forgetting, not going back to things, is "a feature as much as a bug." The brain is fairly good at remembering the most important things. The value lies in the moment when someone wonders what they said in a meeting: just knowing the answer has been kept is already very valuable.

What has changed, he says, is MCP usage, the fastest-growing chart at Granola. Agents have many more cycles, so they will go back and check things, a trend he expects only to increase. Pedregal describes transcriptions as a "goldmine of context." By default, agents are very smart but know nothing about their user. Meetings are plentiful and talking takes little effort. The result is a contextual completeness that people produce naturally and that Granola simply captures.

Another striking design choice: Granola is invisible. Earlier AI note-takers often involved adding a bot to the meeting, whereas Granola simply records audio from the laptop. Pedregal insists the decision was not made to hide the tool. He is not fond of bots, but that was not the initial goal. Above all, the team wanted Granola to always work: in a Slack huddle, a Zoom meeting or an in-person meeting, hitting start is enough for transcription to begin. The only way to do that is to use the computer's system audio. Bots also struck the team as "a really clunky and dehumanizing force" in a meeting.

The approach has a downside: by default, other participants do not know Granola is being used. The company therefore places the responsibility on the user to tell others. Pedregal says this is not really a choice. If there were an easy, bot-free way to make the tool visible, Granola would adopt it: social norms are heading that way anyway, and everyone benefits from knowing whether they are being transcribed. The problem, in his view, is that the Zooms and Meets of the world make this almost impossible because they push their own note-taking systems. No API call lets Granola ask everyone in a meeting for consent. So the team had to go to great lengths.

The result is a watermark that appears at the bottom of the screen when Granola is running. Users can turn the option on, and companies that deploy Granola tend to want it enabled for the sake of visibility. Building it was, by Pedregal's own account, "a bit crazy": it is actually a virtual camera on the computer, and the watermark is injected into the video feed before it reaches Zoom or Google Meet. That is the only way to control how it appears and to make sure it shows up.

Pedregal believes social norms will evolve, that video conferencing platforms will give Granola more control and that things will end up in a good place. He expects a world where, in work meetings, being transcribed is the default and people ask not to be. He hopes that in social settings the default stays the other way around: no transcription unless someone asks for it.

Does that amount to accepting the privacy critique? Pedregal replies that the issue has been on the team's mind from the beginning. He points to another design choice, one he believes nobody else made at the time: Granola has never stored audio. The company has access to audio, could have access to video, and has never kept the audio, because it wanted Granola to feel like a notebook. Early on, it even planned to delete transcriptions once the notes had been produced. It changed its mind: transcriptions are highly valuable, and regenerating notes requires the original source material.

For Pedregal, every new technology calls for careful thought about design choices, after which society adapts. He says he is very glad the company decided not to store audio: "it was the right decision." Granola is now looking at whether to automatically delete transcriptions after a certain time for all users. A lot of value would be lost, which is why the company is researching compression. Nobody probably needs a verbatim transcription of a conversation from three years ago, but people might want to go back and discuss that meeting. "There's utility and invasiveness," he says, and the two have to be balanced.