One of my most successful experiments with artificial intelligence has been with Google’s NotebookLM product. While preparing the update to the Productivity Field Guide, I fed it everything from the prior version, plus transcripts from about 50 videos I recorded, as well as twelve webinars. I also included my research notes prepared for the 2025 edition. This effectively created an AI trained on my own material.

I could then ask it questions that sometimes — though not always —returned insightful answers. This proved to be a valuable resource in completing the 2025 edition, and I believe the final product is better because of it.

Initially, my biggest limitation was the 50-resource cap in NotebookLM. That’s changed now. With a Google One AI Premium account ($20 monthly), you can access NotebookLM Plus, allowing up to 500 separate notebooks and 300 resources per notebook. While I’m comfortable with ChatGPT and Claude, I’m still exploring Google’s Gemini. However, these expanded resource limits in Notebook LM are exactly the kick in the pants I needed to dive deeper.