Podcast Ep 350: We are joined by Google’s Kira Brakhage who outlines how productivity tools like Gemini Notebook will help Irish SMEs chase a share of a €45bn opportunity.
Bank of Ireland and Google recently launched 10,000 fully-funded places for Google AI Professional Certificate qualifications for SME customers. This is an eight-hour course that comes with the qualification at the end of and, crucially, no bill.
One of the modules on the course covers Gemini Notebook, a tool that most business owners familiar with AI would have heard of under its old name NotebookLM. Integrated deeply into the Gemini AI ecosystem, the tool is used by more than 13m people worldwide working in more than 600,000 organisations to transform how they work, study and manage information.
“Essentially, you have a world-class market research analyst working for your business, completely free of charge, and really running on enterprise-grade secure infrastructure”
We spoke with Kira Brakhage, an AI specialist at Google who supports SMEs across Europe about what the tool can actually do for a small business with no technical budget and no time to spare.
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In the previous podcast in this series, we spoke with Karen Stolberg, vice-president of Customer Solutions at Google, who said that AI is capable of generating €45 billion in potential GDP gains for Ireland over the next decade, citing research commissioned by Google.
Turning raw data into finished results
The AI scholarship, offered through Bank of Ireland’s partnership with Google, gives SME staff at no cost access to the Google AI Professional Certificate, an eight to ten hour course delivered through Coursera. Click through to our SME AI Academy to find out more.
“We introduced NotebookLM in 2023 with a very simple goal: help people learn and help people get access to the best information,” Brakhage said. “Google officially renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. It’s the same tool that we all know and love, but it’s now deeply integrated with our most advanced Gemini ecosystem.”
She admitted it is also the tool she reaches for most. “It’s actually also my personal favourite tool. I use Gemini Notebook every single day to organize my work, to find information across massive piles of documents, to answer my colleagues’ questions about AI products, and also to draft my own content.”
No more hallucinations: The privacy and accuracy question
Anyone who has experimented with Gemini Notebook usually comes away very impressed by how the platform can do a myriad of things from creating bespoke podcasts to presentations and more once you feed it data ranging from PDFs, website URLs, text documents and more. The tool processes all of the information and delivers polished results.
Brakhage pointed to meeting transcripts as one of the fastest wins available to any small business.
“Let’s say after you finish a call with a client, you can take your Google Meet recording or an audio file or even a written transcript from the call, and drop it straight into your Gemini Notebook, and then within seconds the tool digests the entire conversation, and you can simply type something like, draft me a client-facing follow-up email outlining our key decisions, and also for my operations team, and then it’s done.”
The output, she said, stays tied to what was actually said. “Unlike more general AI chatbots that might improvise or hallucinate details, Gemini Notebook is strictly grounded in the specific files that you upload. So if something wasn’t said in that meeting, it won’t make it up. And even better, every single point it generates features a clickable citation.”
Staff training was the second use case Brakhage returned to. “A very easy day one project for any small business could be to build a 24/7 interactive onboarding mentor for new team members,” she said, describing how a business can upload its documents, websites and past training videos into a single notebook and hand new hires access to it directly.
“Instead of showing someone or guessing or shadowing, the new hire can log in and treat the notebook as their personal AI mentor. They could ask something like, how can I submit an expense report, or what’s our return policy for damaged goods, and then the notebook will instantly answer their questions with precise citations pointing directly to your documents.”
Your own personal research analyst
Newer agentic features extend the tool into market and competitor research, Brakhage said. “Now you can ask the tool to research a specific competitor or market trend. It will actually directly connect to Google Search as well to dynamically locate relevant sources, things like pricing pages or press releases, pulling that real-time data directly into your workspace.”
The tool can also write and run its own code on uploaded data. “Essentially, you have a world-class market research analyst working for your business, completely free of charge, and really running on enterprise-grade secure infrastructure.”
The audio overviews feature, which converts documents into a two host conversation, has become the tool’s best known feature. Indeed the popular Spotify Wrapped AI podcast uses the same technology.
Brakhage said SMEs are adapting the idea for their own purposes, from five minute proposal summaries clients can listen to on their commute to monthly newsletters turned into audio updates. “It really took this dry text and makes it very personal.”
Asked whether sensitive financial data or client contracts are safe once uploaded, Brakhage was direct.
“Data privacy is really the single biggest question I get every day from the companies I work with at Google, and the short, absolute answer is yes, your data is completely safe and secure, because Google has designed Gemini Notebook with the very strict institutional-grade trust boundaries.
“By default, Google never uses the sources you upload or the questions you ask or your chat history to train our public foundational GenAI models like Gemini.”
Asked about what has impressed her most about how businesses are adopting Gemini Notebook, Brakhage said: “I think it’s just how creative companies are getting, because we really see AI as an amplifier, for people to get creative and save time so they can also get more creative in how they want to work with the tools.
“Audio overviews are one great example, but there’s also a feature where you can generate full explainer videos. I’ve worked with one company in the education space that has a training platform with lots of video content, and they now fully use Gemini Notebook to generate those training videos. They would upload plain text files on a specific topic, and Gemini Notebook will then generate an explainer video, which is very cool because you can also personalise it, make it shorter or longer. They were really able to generate lots of content and lots of AI videos at scale.
“This would have taken them weeks, or a few days at least, to generate a single one, and now they’re having lots of videos out there, reaching a bigger target group with their training videos. It’s been a great use case for this company.”
Image at top background: Photo by Mitchell Luo on Mitchell Luo
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