Is Google’s NotebookLM a secret CRM killer?

I’ve never worked in sales, at least not virtually. The closest I’ve come — and this will date me — is working in retail at the mall as a teenager, and then at the VHS/DVD rental store down the street from my childhood home, so I have tremendous respect for those who do it at a much higher level than I ever did.

But as a result of my short-lived sales experience, I’ve never been a regular user of a customer relationship management (CRM) software program like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Creatio. And candidly, all of the CRMs I’ve ever seen other people use have felt like overkill to me — what do you need besides a contacts list or email inbox?

As it turns out, I may not be alone: Sam Lessin, former VP of product at Facebook and current general partner at Slow Ventures, this morning posted a message on the social network X with a screenshot detailing an example of how his VC firm is using Google’s AI application NotebookLM in place of a CRM, and finding it to be incredibly effective. The application allows for users to ask questions via text and generate synthetic podcasts from data sources they supply.

Lessin’s screenshot is reproduced and the text as well below.

Short the structured CRM companies (cough $CRM, cough)

NotebookLM and the future of AI Structureless CRM — WOW.

Here is a personal experience re: the future of CRM…

Most venture capital firms spend a lot of time and effort putting deals / etc. into their CRMs and tracking it all in a structured way… We never did that… for a whole host of reasons, but mostly laziness // cost/value…

but what we did do for the last decade is write each other a weekly email on the deals we were looking at seriously, notes on interesting meetings, portfolio companies, etc…. The problem is that while we had that history it was buried in email and really quite hard to do anything with except in the rare / odd situation where it was worth digging up real history.

Enter NotebookLM — here is a magical experience for you that illustrates how LLMs really do change the game for how people work…

1. Dump 10 years of emails: I just took the entire ~10 years of history of these emails and exported them as a *.mbox file … and then extracted from that .mbox the key bits of each email (from, date, subject, body)

2. Upload to NotebookLM: take the entire email history and just upload it to Google’s NotebookLM.

3. Tada, I can now ask the ten years of email history covering nearly our entire investment history any question I want… and the answers are SICK. It works GREAT (and deep-links / references everything in the history where needed.

SO WHAT

I just don’t see how any structured CRM product that requires work to update and maintain will survive this paradigm shift. It matters a ton to have the recorded raw material / the input from humans… but it should flow like conversation (text and voice)—and then the machines can take care of the rest…

Human manual input into structured fields is DONE — as are the countless SaaS platforms designed to do / speed just that — and that starts with CRMs

side magic, I was actually really nicely surprised that where I have written these scripts myself historically, chatGPT just abstracted the whole thing… upload the file, tell it what to do, get the stripped text back (not rocket science but cool!)

Gaming out the impact of NotebookLM on the CRM market

Clearly, not all organizations will be able to follow-suit and may miss some of the more robust and powerful features from CRM leaders such as Salesforce and Microsoft.

But even if a few hundred or thousand users do use NotebookLM, or similar open source AI tools, in place of a CRM, it could spell trouble for the companies offering them — at least when it comes to the revenue being generated from this product lines.

Indeed, as for right now, NotebookLM access is free with a free Google user account. With enterprises spending an average of 12% of their revenue on information technology (which include software subscriptions), the temptation to switch to more affordable or free solutions — even if less fully featured — may be quite tempting for large for IT decision-makers.

Of course, with CRM providers racing to offer new AI-enabled updates, agents, and tools, it’s highly likely most will try to offer their own analogous versions of NotebookLM sooner rather than later.

NotebookLM’s incredible ascent

NotebookLM has gained lots of attention recently as one of the most exciting and well-received products to come from Google’s AI efforts, specifically its “Audio Outputs” feature, which allow users to upload documents or URLs, even videos, to NotebookLM’s creation space on the web — notebooklm.google.com — and generates a custom podcast based on the sources provided, complete with AI “hosts” and synthetic voices that engage in easygoing, conversational banter with eerily humanlike qualities.

The product, powered by Google’s Gemini family of large language models, has climbed to millions of users and more than 80,000 organizations, according to a post on X earlier this month.

Last week, Google announced it was working on an enterprise-specific version of the application, NotebookLM Business, to launch later this year.

Indeed, NotebookLM Editorial Leader Steven Johnson reshared Lessin’s X post today on using 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”