Is Google’s NotebookLM a secret CRM killer?

I’ve by no means labored in gross sales, a minimum of not nearly. The closest I’ve come — and it will date me — is working in retail on the mall as a young person, after which on the VHS/DVD rental retailer down the road from my childhood residence, so I’ve great respect for individuals who do it at a a lot larger stage than I ever did.

However because of my short-lived gross sales expertise, I’ve by no means been a daily person of a buyer relationship administration (CRM) software program program like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Creatio. And candidly, all the CRMs I’ve ever seen different individuals use have felt like overkill to me — what do you want moreover a contacts listing or electronic mail inbox?

Because it seems, I will not be alone: Sam Lessin, former VP of product at Fb and present common associate at Sluggish Ventures, this morning posted a message on the social community X with a screenshot detailing an instance of how his VC agency is utilizing Google’s AI utility NotebookLM rather than a CRM, and discovering it to be extremely efficient. The applying permits for customers to ask questions through textual content and generate artificial podcasts from knowledge sources they provide.

Lessin’s screenshot is reproduced and the textual content as properly beneath.

Brief the structured CRM corporations (cough $CRM, cough)

NotebookLM and the way forward for AI Structureless CRM — WOW.

Here’s a private expertise re: the way forward for CRM…

Most enterprise capital corporations spend a whole lot of effort and time placing offers / and so forth. into their CRMs and monitoring all of it in a structured approach… We by no means did that… for an entire host of causes, however largely laziness // price/worth…

however what we did do for the final decade is write one another a weekly electronic mail on the offers we had been severely, notes on attention-grabbing conferences, portfolio corporations, and so forth…. The issue is that whereas we had that historical past it was buried in electronic mail and actually fairly onerous to do something with besides within the uncommon / odd scenario the place it was price digging up actual historical past.

Enter NotebookLM — here’s a magical expertise for you that illustrates how LLMs actually do change the sport for a way individuals work…

1. Dump 10 years of emails: I simply took your complete ~10 years of historical past of those emails and exported them as a *.mbox file … after which extracted from that .mbox the important thing bits of every electronic mail (from, date, topic, physique)

2. Add to NotebookLM: take your complete electronic mail historical past and simply add it to Google’s NotebookLM.

3. Tada, I can now ask the ten years of electronic mail historical past protecting practically our total funding historical past any query I need… and the solutions are SICK. It really works GREAT (and deep-links / references all the pieces within the historical past the place wanted.

SO WHAT

I simply don’t see how any structured CRM product that requires work to replace and preserve will survive this paradigm shift. It issues a ton to have the recorded uncooked materials / the enter from people… nevertheless it ought to circulate like dialog (textual content and voice)—after which the machines can maintain the remaining…

Human handbook enter into structured fields is DONE — as are the numerous SaaS platforms designed to do / velocity simply that — and that begins with CRMs

facet magic, I used to be really actually properly stunned that the place I’ve written these scripts myself traditionally, chatGPT simply abstracted the entire thing… add the file, inform it what to do, get the stripped textual content again (not rocket science however cool!)

Gaming out the impression of NotebookLM on the CRM market

Clearly, not all organizations will have the ability to follow-suit and should miss a few of the extra strong and highly effective options from CRM leaders akin to Salesforce and Microsoft.

However even when just a few hundred or thousand customers do use NotebookLM, or related open supply AI instruments, rather than a CRM, it might spell hassle for the businesses providing them — a minimum of in relation to the income being generated from this product traces.

Certainly, as for proper now, NotebookLM entry is free with a free Google person account. With enterprises spending an common of 12% of their income on info know-how (which embody software program subscriptions), the temptation to modify to extra reasonably priced or free options — even when much less absolutely featured — could also be fairly tempting for giant for IT decision-makers.

After all, with CRM suppliers racing to supply new AI-enabled updates, brokers, and instruments, it’s extremely possible most will attempt to supply their very own analogous variations of NotebookLM sooner fairly than later.

NotebookLM’s unbelievable ascent

NotebookLM has gained a number of consideration lately as some of the thrilling and well-received merchandise to come back from Google’s AI efforts, particularly its “Audio Outputs” function, which permit customers to add paperwork or URLs, even movies, to NotebookLM’s creation house on the internet — notebooklm.google.com — and generates a customized podcast primarily based on the sources supplied, full with AI “hosts” and artificial voices that have interaction in easygoing, conversational banter with eerily humanlike qualities.

The product, powered by Google’s Gemini household of huge language fashions, has climbed to tens of millions of customers and greater than 80,000 organizations, in keeping with a put up on X earlier this month.

Final week, Google introduced it was engaged on an enterprise-specific model of the appliance, NotebookLM Enterprise, to launch later this 12 months.

Certainly, NotebookLM Editorial Chief Steven Johnson reshared Lessin’s X put up as we speak on utilizing NotebookLM as a CRM, remarking: “Such a great way to use the product. If this sounds like it could be helpful in your firm, stay tuned for NotebookLM Business https://notebooklm.google/business”