There’s an AI tool that’s been quietly available for about two years now, costs nothing to start, and solves a problem almost every business has: too many documents, not enough time to read them all.

It’s called Google NotebookLM. And while it’s gotten some attention in tech circles, most small and mid-sized businesses in the Lower Mainland and across BC still haven’t come across it. That gap is worth closing, but with some important caveats for Canadian businesses, especially those of you who’ve made a deliberate choice to keep your data inside Microsoft 365.

What NotebookLM actually does

NotebookLM lets you upload documents (PDFs, Google Docs, meeting transcripts, web pages, audio files) and then have a conversation with them. You ask questions, it answers from the material you’ve provided. It summarizes, cross-references, pulls specific clauses, surfaces key points.

What makes it different from just pasting something into ChatGPT is that it’s grounded entirely in what you’ve uploaded. When it gives you an answer, it cites the specific source and page. You can click through and verify. It’s not mixing in outside information or making things up from its training data. It’s working from your documents and only your documents.

That grounding is the whole reason it works for business use. “Does our service agreement include a limitation of liability clause?” gets you a real answer tied to the actual text, not a generic explanation of what limitation of liability clauses usually say.

What businesses are using it for

The use cases tend to cluster around a few areas:

• Contract and document review. Upload a vendor agreement, lease, or service contract. Ask it to summarize key terms, flag unusual clauses, or explain a section in plain English. Not a replacement for a lawyer on anything consequential, but useful for getting oriented before you spend lawyer time on it.
• Meeting notes and project follow-up. Upload transcripts or notes from a series of client meetings. Ask it to pull all open action items, summarize what was decided on a topic, or identify themes across the last six months of conversations.
• Staff onboarding and training. Upload your operations manual, policies, or technical documentation. New employees can ask questions and get answers from your actual materials, rather than interrupting someone senior for every small thing.
• Research and competitive analysis. Upload industry reports, competitor materials, or market analyses and ask it to compare, summarize, or extract specific data points.

There’s also a feature called Audio Overview that surprises most people the first time they try it. NotebookLM can generate a podcast-style audio conversation between two AI hosts discussing the contents of your notebook. Upload a dense report, click one button, and a few minutes later you have a natural-sounding audio summary you can listen to on your commute. It’s more useful than it sounds.

The question Canadian businesses should ask first

Before you start uploading client files and internal documents to any AI tool, there’s a question worth asking: where does your data go, and what happens to it?

For Canadian businesses, this has real implications under PIPEDA (Canada’s federal private sector privacy law) and under provincial equivalents in BC, Alberta, and Quebec. If you’re uploading documents that contain client personal information, you have obligations around how that information is handled and where it’s processed.

The good news on NotebookLM: Google has stated that your uploaded documents are never used to train its AI models. If you’re accessing it through a Google Workspace account (a paid work account, not a personal Gmail), your uploads and queries are shielded from human review entirely. That’s a meaningful distinction from using a personal account.

The less good news: your data is processed on Google’s servers, which for some regulated industries or clients with strict data handling requirements may not be appropriate. If you’re handling health information, legal files, or anything covered by a client confidentiality agreement, read the terms carefully before uploading.

Which brings us to the bigger question we get from a lot of the businesses we work with.

We’re a Microsoft shop. Is there a NotebookLM for us?

This is one of the principles we follow with the businesses we advise at Raxxos: pick one vendor ecosystem and stay in it. For most BC businesses, that means either Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. And for the majority of our clients, it’s Microsoft.

The argument for staying in your ecosystem isn’t just about simplicity. It’s about security and data governance. Every time you introduce a third-party AI tool that sits outside your primary vendor’s environment, you’re creating a new surface area for data to leave that environment. That’s a manageable risk in some contexts. In others, it’s not worth it.

So if you’re a Microsoft 365 shop and you want what NotebookLM offers, the answer is Microsoft Copilot Notebooks.

Copilot Notebooks is Microsoft’s direct equivalent. It’s an AI-powered workspace where you bring together files, meeting notes, chat history from Teams, links, and other content, and then use Copilot to query, summarize, and work with all of it. Because it lives inside Microsoft 365, your data stays inside your existing Microsoft tenant. The same data governance policies, the same compliance boundaries, the same security controls you’ve already set up apply automatically.

The tradeoff is cost. NotebookLM is free. Copilot Notebooks requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, which runs around $30 USD per user per month on top of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription. For a team of ten, that’s a real number to weigh.

But for businesses that have made Microsoft their platform and want to keep all their data there (which is the right call for most businesses from a security and simplicity standpoint) Copilot Notebooks is the better choice. You’re not introducing a new vendor, a new set of terms, or a new place for data to land.

Our own team uses it for exactly this kind of work. Georgy Johnson, one of our technicians, recently used Copilot to set up a structured Microsoft OneNote runbook for IT operations, something that would have taken hours to research and design manually. “It gave me a great template to follow,” he notes. That’s the kind of practical, in-workflow use case that makes Copilot worth the investment for a Microsoft-first business.

“The common concern I hear regarding AI tool use is data security, whether what you share is ever used externally. I tell our clients, who are all on Microsoft, to stick to using Copilot instead of other tools, as your data stays within the organization. Of course you need to put some guardrails in place, but overall Microsoft and Copilot have been great for troubleshooting, writing scripts, and assisting with other tasks.”

Georgy Johnson, Raxxos Technology Inc.

How to think about this decision

Here’s a simple framework:

• You’re on Google Workspace and handle relatively low-sensitivity documents: NotebookLM is free, works well, and is worth trying today. Start with notebooklm.google.com.
• You’re on Google Workspace and handle sensitive client data: Use NotebookLM through your Workspace account (not personal Gmail), review Google’s data handling terms, and consider whether specific document types should stay out of it entirely.
• You’re on Microsoft 365 and want to keep everything in your ecosystem: Look at Microsoft Copilot Notebooks. Factor the licensing cost into your decision, but take seriously the security benefit of staying inside a single vendor environment.
• You’re not sure what ecosystem you’re in or whether your current setup is actually secure: That’s a conversation worth having before you add any AI tools to the mix.

The broader point is that AI tools for document work are genuinely useful and not particularly complicated to start using. The question isn’t whether they’re worth trying. It’s whether you’re trying them in a way that’s appropriate for the kind of data your business handles.

If you want a straight answer on what makes sense for your specific setup, what tools are appropriate, what the actual security and privacy implications are, and how to introduce AI capabilities without creating new problems, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we have with businesses across the Lower Mainland every day. Book a free call with Raxxos and we’ll give you a straight answer.