Every business is sitting on a pile of its own information and barely using it. Long PDFs. Research docs. Meeting transcripts. Planning material. Contracts. It is all there, and almost none of it is working for you, because reading and cross-referencing it by hand takes time nobody has.
I have been spending time in a tool called NotebookLM, and it is one of the more practical ways I have found to fix that. The idea is simple. You drop in your actual source material, not summaries and not random prompts, your real working documents. Then instead of just chatting with it, you can turn that material into things you can use. Audio overviews. Slide decks. Mind maps. Reports. Data tables. A set of questions and answers pulled straight from your own files.
The tactical play is exactly that. Feed it real source material and watch how fast patterns, gaps, and talking points start to surface. You are no longer guessing what is inside your own documents. You are pressure-testing them.
For a business the use cases are everywhere. Drop in three years of proposals and ask what actually closed. Load your policies and turn them into a plain-language guide for new hires. Feed it a stack of customer feedback and ask what keeps coming up. Take the long report nobody finished reading and get an overview the whole team will actually use. The information was always there. You just never had a fast way to get answers out of it.
This is not magic, and it gets more useful every month. The point is a mindset shift. Your company's documents are not a filing cabinet you visit when you have to. They are a source you can question and build from. Start with the pile of information you know is valuable and never have time to read. That is the first thing to feed in.
Originally published in Daniel Rivera's newsletter, Between Meetings & Meals, on Substack and at danielgrivera.com.