AI meeting notetaker Granola refuses employee transcript requests from bosses

Granola captures meeting audio locally on a user’s computer and generates private transcripts by default, according to an interview with CEO Chris Pedregal published by Platformer. Pedregal told Casey Newton that companies regularly ask Granola for access to employee transcripts, but the startup declines those requests, citing concerns about enabling surveillance in the workplace.

Pedregal framed Granola’s stance as a deliberate ethical choice: “If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn’t feel right to me, and that’s not a future we want to build towards.” He added that Granola’s notes are private by default and that “companies hate us for this.”

The company is also exploring product changes that could further limit data retention. Pedregal said Granola is researching whether to automatically delete verbatim transcripts after a set period while compressing the contained knowledge into a working memory. Separately, Granola is prototyping “enhanced transcripts” designed for AI agents to integrate into corporate knowledge bases.

On disclosure, Pedregal acknowledged that Granola’s current approach makes the tool invisible to meeting participants by default. He attributed this to technical constraints in Zoom and Google Meet, which do not provide an API for third-party bots to request consent from all participants. As a workaround, Granola displays an animated watermark on the user’s video feed via a virtual camera to signal its presence. Pedregal predicted that workplace norms will shift toward default transcription and said he expects the expectation to become: “in work meetings, the expectation is that you are being transcribed by default, and you ask not to be transcribed.”

Pedregal co-founded Granola in 2022 after earlier stints at Google and the Google-acquired homework-helper app Socratic. The company was most recently valued at $1.5 billion and employs around 80 people, with plans to grow to no more than 120 employees, according to the interview.