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Generative AI may be both the most useful and the most mystifying tool of our modern-tech era. The problemaside from all the endlessly documented issues around accuracyis that generative AI generally seems to function in a DOS-like blank prompt form. The onus is squarely on you to figure out what to ask and how to put these saucy systems to use. That black-box feeling is especially apparent when you look at NotebookLM, an “AI-first notebook” launched by Google nearly two years ago. The idea behind NotebookLM is that you upload your own source materials within carefully confined notebooks, and you can then lean on Google’s Gemini AI to interact with that material in all sorts of illuminating ways. Since each notebook is limited only to whatever source materials you supply, the prevalence of those pesky hallucinations seems to be less of an issue. And since everything within your NotebookLM notebooks is kept completely privatenot even used for any manner of AI model training, according to Googleyou can connect it to all sorts of subjects and use it to gain a level of deep insight that was never before so easily accessible. But again, theres the black box challenge. When you first pull up NotebookLM, it’s tough to know where to begin and how to interact with the thing in practical, approachable ways. Even as someone who writes about technology for a living and has spent more time than most mortals thinking about this service, I realized I hadn’t entirely figured out how to use it in a way that would genuinely be helpful in my day-to-day life. So I challenged myself to dig deep, get beyond all the conceptual excitement, and come up with a series of real-world use cases for NotebookLM that any regular human could both appreciate and emulate. I’ve got 15 super-specific scenarios, all tried and tested, in which the artificial intelligence answer machine could be useful for you. Follow this road map and see which path holds the most promise from your perspective. 1. Your on-demand product answer machine Up first is a possibility that’s supremely simple yet packed with productivity potential: Create a new NotebookLM notebook called “Product Manuals.” Then, every time you purchase a new appliance or device of some sort, search the web for a PDF version of its manual and add it into the notebook. If you really want to get wild, include an image of any warranty cards, too. Then, anytime you need to know anything about those productshow some part of them works, how to fix something that’s gone awry, or if and how you’re eligible for a warranty-related repairjust fire up that same NotebookLM notebook and ask, ask, ask away. 2. Your instant car support system Next, try using NotebookLM to help wrangle the most expensive gadget you own. Do a similar web search for your current vehicle’s owner manual, then drop it into its own NotebookLM notebook with the vehicle’s name as the title. Repeat for any additional vehicles you own and any new ones you purchase down the road. After recently trading in our old minivan for a hybrid Honda CR-V, my wife and I wasted far too much time flipping through the vehicle’s paper manual to try to figure out what some random button on the dashboard did. Later, after downloading a PDF of the manual from Honda’s website and then uploading it into NotebookLM, it took me all of 10 seconds to reach the same answersimply by asking.Lesson learned. With your car manual in NotebookLM, you can simply ask questions and get instant answers. 3. An interactive car maintenance journal While we’re thinking about cars, every time you go to the mechanic, snap a photo of the service receipt and upload it into a NotebookLM notebook created specifically for that one vehicle. You can make it even more useful by uploading the same owner’s manual you found a moment ago into that notebook, too. Doing so will give you two very practical benefits: First, anytime a question comes up about what work you’ve had done on the vehicle or when a certain repair took place, you can just pull up that notebook and ask. Second, with the manual and its instructions there alongside all of your history, you can bring the two sources of info together to ask NotebookLM targeted questions that take the manufacturer’s guidance and your past services into considerationlike, for instance, when you should rotate your tires next or what other possibilities you should be thinking about at your next oil change appointment. And on a related note . . . 4. An interactive home maintenance journal Start a NotebookLM notebook for your house, then upload every invoice and estimate you get for a home repair as well as every receipt from a new appliance purchase. Whenever you next need to know when, exactly, your roof was replaced or in what year you got your current furnaceor even what brand and model it isyou’ll have a single simple place to ask and get answers. And that’s a heck of a lot easier than having an overflowing folder of assorted old papers to sift through in every such scenario. 5. Your personal company wiki Does the company you run, or maybe just work for, have more handbook-type info than any reasonably sane human could possibly ingest and remember? If so, use a dedicated NotebookLM notebook to store all of itguides, documents, operating procedures, even lists of contacts for different departments and purposes. From that moment forward, when a question comes up about how smething is supposed to work or whom you’re supposed to contact for some particular purpose, your answer will never be more than a single quick question away. 6. Your instruction-expert wizard Why limit yourself to work, maintenance, and appliances? With anything that has an instruction manual involved, dump a digital version of the document into its own NotebookLM notebookeven for board games. The next time any kind of question comes up related to those instructions, you’ve got a fast and effective way to get answers. 7. A contract deposit box Whether you’re a freelancer juggling new contracts every month, an employee signing a new agreement each year, or an employer asking dozens of workers to sign your ever-evolving documents, creating a centralized repository for all your contracts can be a real time-saver in the future. Need to remember when you last signed something with a specific person or provider? Not sure what the terms of some agreement requiredor when a particular document expires? Whatever the case may be, once the info’s all in NotebookLM, you’ve always got an easy place to askand let the system find the answer for you. NotebookLM is perfect for parsing complex contract terms or analyzing multiple contracts together. 8. Your meeting memory Provided you’re using something to record important meetingsbe it a general-purpose AI-powered note-taker, a video-call-specific summarizer, or an app designed to take notes during regular audio callsthat history will be much more useful if you bring it over to a NotebookLM notebook. With such a system in place, you can simply go to NotebookLM and ask targeted questions about any of your past meetings instead of having to dig through the transcripts individually. 9. An interview inquiry station While we’re thinking about transcripts, if you conduct any kind of interviewswith job candidates, as a journalist, or for any other purposetake each transcript and create a NotebookLM specifically for it. (Or, if you have a group of related interviews, put them all in one notebook.) Upload either the audio or the text, depending on what’s available, and then take the opportunity to ask NotebookLM questions about your conversationbe they specific (like what the person said about some particular topic) or broad (like asking NotebookLM what interesting quotes came up during the interview that you might have missed). Upload an interview to NotebookLM and let it act as your guide to the conversation. You’ll obviously still want to refer to the full transcript at timesand to double-check the accuracy of any quote you’re actually citing anywherebut it can be a helpful way to find something fast when you can’t remember the exact words involved or to stumble onto something you might have otherwise glossed over. 10. An intelligent feedback interpreter If your business relies on any manner of feedback to guide its operations, do yourself a favor and create a NotebookLM notebook where you can upload those resultsas spreadsheets or in whatever form they take. From reviews to survey responses, you’ll then be able to ask NotebookLM to help summarize the key themes and trends, pick out recurring positive or critical responses, and even find particularly memorable quotes for potential testimonial use. 11. Your performance review reviewer For anyone managing employee performance, NotebookLM can be a major asset. Create an individual notebook for each employee and place all their performance reviews therethen, when the time comes for the next assessment, you’ll have an easy way to revisit past highlights to identify trends and provide context for comparison. 12. A financial reality checker Provided you’re comfortable with the notion, NotebookLM can turn up some really interesting insights by analyzing things like your tax returns, bank statements, and credit card statements over the years. (For what it’s worth, Google is explicit about the fact that it doesn’t in any way access, share, or use any data uploaded into NotebookLMeven for AI model training.) With that type of info in its own dedicated notebook, you can ask NotebookLM to give you an overview of your spending habits, to identify areas where you could cut back or potentially be eligible for additional tax benefits, and to surface other such pointers that you can then investigate more thoroughly on your own or with an accounting professional. NotebookLM can be incredibly effective at analyzing financial summaries and helping you both find specific answers and spot broader trends. 13. An audio-video reading resource Ever find yourself running into interesting-looking videos or podcasts and just not having the time or inclination to sit through them in their entirety? Make yourself a NotebookLM notebook called “Audio-Video,” then drop a link to any YouTube video or audio clip you encounter into that area. You can then ask NotebookLM for the high pointsor for any specific info you’re looking to findfrom any of the clips individually or even collectively. 14. An elevated reading list NotebookLM can be a fantastic way to collect links you want to read for later revisiting. With a notebook called “Reading List,” you can see the entire text of any article whose URL you add in, right then and there and in a stripped-down and simplified formatand you can ask NotebookLM for information about, or even summaries of, any or all of your saved links, too: What was that article I saved from New York a while back? Give me the most important takeaways from that Fast Company piece I saved on privacy the other day. I’m never going to catch up with everything I saved this week. Show me a summary of all the articles I added over the past seven days. You get the idea. And finally . . . 15. Your calendar companion Get a whole new level of insight into how you’re spending your time and what’s actually gone down on your calendar by exporting your complete calendar history, and then importing it into NotebookLMwhere you can create a custom notebook to interact with it. In Google Calendar, this is as easy as clicking the gear-shaped icon in the desktop website’s upper-right corner, selecting “Settings,” then clicking “Import & export” in the left-of-screen side menu and clicking the “Export” option. You’ll then need to take the resulting .ics file and convert it into plain textwhich you can do in a matter of seconds with a free conversion website like this one. Finally, with the resulting .txt file in a NotebookLM note, try asking questions about anything from how many meetings you attended over a given time period to how many hours you spent at the doctor’s office last year. You can also ask for specific info such as how often, on average, you get haircuts or how long it’s been since you last had a job interview. ~google-notebooklm-calendar.jpgYou might be surprised at the types of insights you uncover with your calendar data in NotebookLM’s metaphorical hands.~ The possibilities are practically endlessand all you’ve gotta do is ask. For even more practical productivity discoveries, check out my free Cool Tools newslettera single new tech treasure in your inbox every Wednesday.
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E-Commerce
What are the hallmarks of a luxury brand? Exclusivity, artisan craftsmanship, and a high price tag to match. But iconic fashion house Gucci may have just learned the hard way that advertising can undermine all those qualitiesespecially if its made with AI. On February 23, Gucci started posting promotional images for its upcoming Primavera Fashion Show, its first show under new creative director Demna. The first few photos were inoffensiveMichelangelos David statue, a pair of leather loafersbut then, things took a turn. The next four pictures Gucci posted came with a disclaimer in their captions: Created with AI. The AI-generated ads included renderings of a woman in a fur coat in the middle of a restaurant, a pair of legs emerging from a cars backseat, two models framed against the night sky, and a sports car. They were all images that could easily have been created traditionally with models and photography, leaving fashion fans online scratching their heads as to why Gucci would turn to AI. PRIMAVERAFebruary 272 p.m. CETCreated with AI pic.twitter.com/sNbcFrpTX9— gucci (@gucci) February 23, 2026 PRIMAVERAFebruary 272 p.m. CETCreated with AI pic.twitter.com/tcmmFRJBFo— gucci (@gucci) February 23, 2026 PRIMAVERAFebruary 272 p.m. CET#GucciPrimaveraCreated with AI pic.twitter.com/lNyLEMysp3— gucci (@gucci) February 23, 2026 PRIMAVERAFebruary 272 p.m. CETCreated with AI pic.twitter.com/l7XnsfVGsD— gucci (@gucci) February 23, 2026 AI-generated content often falls flat in advertising. Take Svedka Vodkas now infamous Super Bowl ad, which featured a robotic duo straight from the uncanny valley. Social media users decried the ad as nightmare fuel, with one self-described Svedka fan rationalizing that with how cheap it is they can’t afford a real budget for an ad. Gucci, of course, doesnt have that same excuse. Its no doubt much less expensive to generate an image with AI than to hire a full crew and book a location for a photo shootbut for a brand whose cheapest handbag sells for $850 (and whose most expensive retails for $10,000), disgruntled consumers are making it clear that cutting corners isnt a good look. Fashion lovers werent shy to critique Guccis move. Any luxury brands that used AI slop should not be [considered] luxury anymore, one X user wrote in a viral post. Fastest way for a luxury brand to lose its value, said another. Any luxury brands that used AI slop should not be consider luxury anymore https://t.co/GfwVPlrOhM— (@musesarchive) February 23, 2026 A "luxury" brand using AI…this is a new low https://t.co/eOSK9uVQPc— honeyariedits seeing ari (@honeyariedits) February 23, 2026 a billion dollar company couldn't shoot this? https://t.co/hGLN2xCVl9— (@mugIerette) February 23, 2026 > billion dollar luxury brand> ai photoshoot You cant call yourself luxury anymore. https://t.co/GZlPh0FRha— kira (@kirawontmiss) February 24, 2026 Is Gucci ok with people stealing clothes from their stores, or is it just artists work it is ok to steal? https://t.co/mYuH7WUDks— Ed Newton-Rex (@ednewtonrex) February 24, 2026 fastest way for a luxury brand to lose its value. https://t.co/4ahkNyInz2— The Notorious J.O.V. (@whotfisjovana) February 24, 2026 Whether Gucci can make up any social ground with its actual products remains to be seen: Its Primavera Fashion Show will stream live on X on February 27 at 8 a.m. But Guccis experiment with AI advertising suggests that if brands ask consumers to spare no expense for luxury products, theyll need to shell out too where it counts. Gucci did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.
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E-Commerce
One week ago, a Savannah, Georgia, woman was killed during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pursuit. It’s not the first time in recent weeks that a bystander has been killed by ICE. However, this storyone involving a Black bystanderhasn’t taken off with the same ferocity as others that have flooded our feeds and torn at our collective heartstrings. In fact, many haven’t even heard about the recent incident. Dr. Linda Davis, a beloved 52-year-old mother of five, was struck by a truck driven by a man who was fleeing immigration officers. Davis taught kindergarten and first grade at Herman W. Hesse K-8 School in Savannah’s south-side suburbs, less than a half mile from where she was killed. The school’s principal, Alonna McMullen, mourned her death in a statement to PBS. “It was extremely difficult to tell 5 and 6 year olds that the teacher they loved and cherished will not be returning to see them,” McMullen said. “To see the looks on their faces, it broke my heart.” Davis’s family also released a statement mourning her tragic and untimely passing, but noting that they would not yet “speculate about the circumstances” that led to it. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was quick to blame Oscar Vasquez Lopez, the suspect who was fleeing ICE when his car collided with Davis’s. In a statement, DHS described Lopez as “a criminal illegal alien from Guatemala who was issued a final order of removal by a federal judge in 2024.” Different circumstances, and a very different public response Davis’s death is far from the only news story we’ve seen recently involving ICE-related deaths. In January, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse for the VA, was shot and killed by an ICE agent. That shooting came just weeks after Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother, was also killed by ICE. In both cases, there was instant outrage across the country, as many Americans took to protesting to voice their concerns around ICE’s protocols. As the national reaction swept the country, the number of stories just seemed to multiply accordingly. For weeks, these stories dominated the news cycle and social media, as protests erupted nationwide. More than a month later, demonstrations honoring the two slain civilians have continued in some parts of the country. Importantly, Davis’s death happened under a different set of circumstances than both Pretti’s and Good’s. For starters, the incident did not involve ICE gunfire. However, the death did occur as a result of an ICE pursuit. And it comes at a time when many violent altercations with ICE are being documented, raising serious questions about the agency’s impact on public safety. While Chatham County Police have a “no-chase” policy for non-violent felonies, the ICE agents seemed to fail to abide by it. In video footage from school zone cameras, three vehicles can be seen chasing Lopez through the school zone. Local police agencies have denied any involvement with the chase. Chester Ellis, Chatham County’s board chairman, spoke to WTOC shortly after the incident, noting that local law enforcement agencies in the area have restrictive policies in place that are specifically meant to guard against incidents like this one. [Our] no-chase policy is to help protect our citizens more than it is anything else, Ellis said. Fast Company reached out to DHS for a comment on the footage but did not hear back by the time of publication. Different circumstances aside, all of the recent ICE-involved civilian deaths have been troubling. Still, while there have been vigils, a GoFundMe campaign, and some major news stories on Linda Davis, the incident is far from being as visible as that of Pretti’s or Good’s. That can be observed in the lack of coverage on major broadcasts, like ABC World News. Likewise, traction gained on the GoFundMe pages for each of the families is notably different according to race. Campaigns for Good and Pretti quickly raised well over $1 million in donations. (At present they have $1.4 million and $1.8 million, respectively.) In the week since Davis’s passing, the GoFundMe for her family has raised just over $16,000 as of Tuesday. Davis isn’t the first Black person to be killed recently in relation to ICE. Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old father of two, was killed by an off-duty ICE officer in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve after he reportedly fired a gun in the air. According to an autopsy report, Porter was shot by the officer three times. The local community rallied for accountability from ICE while DHS denied any wrongdoing, echoing the organization’s persistent statements that blame the individuals killed by ICE for their own deaths. The fundraiser has amassed about $300,000 in donations since the incident took place two months ago. Ingrained racial bias It’s tough to miss that there has been far less coverage and, subsequently, less moral outrage involving the most recent ICE-related death. Some experts say that’s not due just to the different set of circumstances, but instead reflects racial biases that allow some stories to get less circulation. Brian C. Stewart is a trial attorney at Parker & McConkie who worked for the family of Gabby Petito, the young traveler who was killed by her fiancé in 2021. That story, which captured global attention, was the subject of countless headlines, dominating the news cycle for months. Eventually, it led to a three-part docuseries, along with other TV movies. Stewart understads how racial bias impacts how stories travel well. He tells Fast Company there’s even a name for it. It’s called “missing white woman syndrome,” and it “refers to the fact that when a white woman goes missing, her case is much more likely to receive widespread media coverage than when a woman of color goes missing,” Stewart says. He continues, “The issue isnt that those cases shouldnt get attention; its that many others dont.” The attorney says that cases involving women of color often don’t get the same kind of attention. However, Stewart adds that it’s not just one system that allows for that bias to continueit’s all of them. “Media outlets, law enforcement, social media platforms, and even the public all play a role,” the attorney explains. “What gets shared, clicked on, and prioritized shapes which cases receive attention.” Not only does the lack of attention lead to cases stalling, Stewart says, but it “leaves families feeling forgotten,” too. Media studies research underscores coverage disparities Surely, there are always arguments to be made about how different circumstances may lead to different reactions or even detract from widespread national moral outrage. However, given how many more Black Americans are killed by law enforcement than white Americans (about three times as many fatal shootings), equality in terms of uproar feels extraordinarily far off. In part, that may be because Americans don’t see as many news stories on Black tragedies. According to a 2020 data analysis published in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, when victims are killed in “predominantly Black neighborhoods,” the stories aren’t covered as often as those that occur in non-Hispanic white neighborhoods. Likewise, the way those stories are covered is often different. “Those killed in predominantly Black or Hispanic neighborhoods are also less likely to be discussed as multifaceted, complex people,” the report explains. A 2021 report from the Equal Justice Initiative and Global Strategy Group on disparities in media coverage also found racial bias, with the bias showing up in 20 different areas of media coverage. For example, mugshots were used in coverage of cases involving Black defendants 45% of the time, compared to just 8% of the time for white defendants. White defendants were called by their names 50% more than Black defendants. Meanwhile, white victims were shown in photos with friends and familyaimed at drawing sympathetic responsesfour times more than Black victims. So far, it’s unclear as to whether ICE will be held accountable for any of the deaths that have occurred as a result of the organization’s pursuits. But as a bare minimum, the public deserves to know about each and every one, regardless of circumstance or of skin color.
Category:
E-Commerce
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