AI Skill Series | 💡The Best AI Tool You’re Not Using (Yet)
Five power moves that transform NotebookLM from study aid to executive OS upgrade.
IoNTELLIGENCE blends brain science with strategic AI skills to help high performers thrive in a rapidly changing world.
Upgrade Your Brain. Master AI. Be Future-Ready.
⏳ Time Investment: 6 Minutes
🎯 Goal: Train you to become an AI-Enhanced Executive.
🛠️ Note: This is the third in a series of practical posts to help you build your personal AI Operating System.
Modern executives’ biggest battle is cognitive overload: attention, not information, is the new bottleneck.
Most people think about NotebookLM as a study aid for students, or for the much-discussed party trick of turning any piece of content into a podcast. There is so much more to this technology, and you’re missing a trick if you don’t add it to your AI workflow right now.
NotebookLM is an excellent addition to your AI toolkit because it lets you fence off information from hallucination, visualize hidden patterns in your data, and ask questions of your sources. This is the bandwidth multiplier your brain’s been waiting for.
Read on to learn how to step up your personal AI Operating System with NotebookLM.
The 5 Reasons You Should Use NotebookLM
1. It doesn’t hallucinate or ingratiate.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeekSeek were all trained on massive datasets from the internet. They’re also engineered to be people-pleasing. That’s why you run the risk, roughly 25% of the time, of your favorite bot making sh!t up or telling you what you want to hear.
NotebookLM is not designed to be sycophantic, and it only draws from the material you upload to it. It’s incapable of hallucinating (unless the documents it was fed are flawed themselves). This feature essentially eliminates a significant risk factor in using these tools, and should reassure you that the results it produces are entirely trustworthy.
2. You can restrict its knowledge.
This is a related advantage to the first point. Say you want to understand how your thinking has evolved over the last year; you can upload your journal entries, have it summarize and analyze the information, and then ask follow-ups. The beauty of this tool is that it remains single-mindedly focused on your sources; it cannot incorporate outside information.
You can apply this approach to a range of topics, ranging from the collected ideas of your favorite non-fiction writer (for me, it's Yuval Noah Harari) to your comprehensive medical history or your stock portfolio. You get to set the limits of the universe it draws upon, so you control the machine’s “information diet.” This allows you to create targeted, specific, and discrete notebooks on any subject that can benefit from intentional isolation.
3. Forget Audio Overviews. The real unlock is Mind Maps.
NotebookLM enables us to build context between concepts and create a visual map of all the content we upload to it. You effectively create a meta-index, similar to the one found at the back of a non-fiction book, incorporating the assortment 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 of the legitimate complaints about AI tools is that they are making us dumber by doing the thinking that we ought to be doing for ourselves. This is a real risk, and one I’ve written about before (see below).
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.
4. The ability to ask questions of your data is a game-changer.
NotebookLM excels at transforming data into actionable insights through its advanced data analysis tools.
Say you want to get a handle on your finances. You can upload all of your credit card statements for the past year, and then ask it questions you have in completely natural language. Typing in “What was the biggest expense in May?” will pull up all the relevant information, but just from your statement. You can also get it to analyze your data to identify trends, patterns, and outliers. It’s like chatting with an “accountant” who has pored over your books and can respond to any query you can come up with.
5. Share your knowledge and collaborate frictionlessly.
Imagine creating a new hire onboarding Notebook, where you upload all of your company policies, benefits summary, 5-year strategic plans, and YouTube videos of the CEO making public statements. Then every new employee can “query” that notebook as if it represented the organization’s digital brain. A manager might never have to answer a “where can I find the …” question ever again.
This also makes collaborative thinking a breeze. You can share an entire research notebook with colleagues, classmates, or collaborators, giving them access to all the uploaded sources. Any insights you uncover, such as a Note you make on a question you ask of the combined database, automatically cascade to everyone else on the project.
Google recently made it possible to make Notebooks public, so one doesn’t have to manually and individually share access with people outside your organization. Over 140,000 public notebooks have been created in the past month alone.
Finally, they have just released a series of open, pre-populated Notebooks on various topics, such as Longevity advice from Eric Topol, bestselling author of “Super Agers,” or Expert analysis and predictions for 2025, as shared in The World Ahead annual report by The Economist.
Those are the five reasons why you should use NotebookLM. Here are four ways to use it best.
🚨 The 4 Best Use Cases for NotebookLM
1. Create a Notebook for your upcoming Summer Holiday.
Create a notebook called ‘Summer European Trip 2025’ and upload all relevant documents, such as hotel reservations, car rental bookings, visa information, packing lists, and any other pertinent information. Download the mobile app to access answers on the go.
Then, "ask" the notebook questions, such as:
What time is our flight to Greece tomorrow?
What’s the cancellation policy for our dinner reservation on Tuesday?
You can even generate a mind map for your entire trip, providing a quick overview of all your plans.
Executive Move: Do this for your Reading Pack in preparation for the upcoming Board of Directors meeting.
2. Never “watch” a YouTube video again.
The black belt step is to turn a video into a mind map. First, here’s how to do it:
Open YouTube and copy the video URL, and add it to the sources.
Wait for it to process and click on ‘Mind map’ when it’s ready.
Now, here’s the powerful unlock:
The mind map will provide a 30,000-foot view of the video. Then you can click on any of the nodes and explore more. Doing so will take you back to a chat box where you can ask NotebookLM questions about the content, as if it were a professor providing office hours.
Bonus: You can save all of the summaries generated by NotebookLM into your notes, so you have also created a practical summary (as opposed to a transcript) of the video.
Executive Move: I use this system for any dense, work-related video I want to process quickly, from which I need to capture key takeaways. This hack converts a 60-minute video into a 5-minute map, with 55 minutes of your time returned to your calendar.
3. Deep Dive into a Complex Topic.
I recently developed an abiding interest in understanding the theory of cosmic inflation (nerd alert, I know!) after coming across a video interview with its progenitor, Alan Guth. YouTube helpfully steered me toward more videos on the topic, but I needed a way to gain a more comprehensive perspective. I uploaded them and had it synthesize the latest thinking. It was able to spot connections between different sub-theories as well as map the overall landscape of the topic in a way that I could easily absorb.
Executive Move: You can apply the same methodology to a more business-centric topic, such as understanding Agentic AI or the impact of tariffs on your industry. 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.
4. Create 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 listen to almost every podcast from both Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. 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 book extracts into a digital sounding board that I query anytime. I recently did this with content from my late father, in an experimental attempt to create a virtual version of him to whom I could turn for advice. 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: An excellent professional application is to create a virtual version of your boss or chairperson. Collect their email directives to you and presentations they’ve given, and you can create their digital twin to whom you can pitch and stress-test ideas before you propose them.
🛠️ Your Next Step
💬 Still unsure where to start, or how to get to the next level?
I train executives on how to build their personal AI operating systems. From tool fluency to workflow integration, I’ll help you go from overwhelmed to augmented. Let’s chat.
If you found this post interesting or valuable, forward it to a friend or click the ❤️ button so more people can discover it. Thank you!
IoNTELLIGENCE by Ion Valis. I'm an executive coach and personal AI strategist. To learn more about my work, please visit my website or connect with me on LinkedIn.