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Behind the Craft · 2 min · Oct 4, 2026

Granola lets enterprise workflows move beyond its UI

Sam Stephenson

Co-founder, Granola

  • Peter YangHost · Host, Behind the Craft

    Led product at Roblox, Reddit, Twitch and Meta for 10+ years.

About this segment

Sam says the team resisted agent and API use at first, but large companies need Granola to fit their internal tools. It can provide meeting context for workflows in other apps.

From “How to Use AI to Survive (and Even Enjoy) Meetings | Sam Stephenson”, Oct 4, 2026. Watch the full episode

“powering workflows off in all kinds of other apps”
Sam Stephensonat 14:59 · Behind the Craft14:59

Takeaways

  1. Granola initially tried to keep users inside its own UI.
  2. Enterprise customers need it to connect with internal tools.
  3. Sam sees meeting context powering workflows in other apps.
Watch 2:24 from 13:53

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 19:25A design system helps engineers and agents ship consistently6:57
  2. 26:11An internal agent can become a tool everyone improves4:19
  3. 30:19Easy shipping makes product quality matter more2:58
  4. 0:51Granola helps Sam prepare for and recover from meetings2:58
  5. 3:38Granola hides the transcript to keep users present2:41
  6. 10:33Granola keeps private meetings separate from shared team notes3:12

  7. 13:53Granola lets enterprise workflows move beyond its UI2:24

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Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 13:59

    this like people just getting their agents to use these products right like just use the mcp or use the api yeah and then and then and then how do you think of that so then maybe your beautiful ui wouldn't even be shown to people like how do you think about that you know like as a designer like do you design it instead yeah all right there's definitely a there's a pang of sadness in the UI designer uh part of me when I think about that for sure yeah yeah I um we honestly I think because of that reason we fought it for a while like we um we were kind of like now we we really need to keep everybody in the Grinnell UI for everything I think um it's been really uh it's really working with bigger and bigger enterprise customers um because I think just as soon as you become a big enough company you have it's inevitable you have all of this internal tooling

  2. 14:45

    and you if granola doesn't play nice with that internal tooling like you kind of you're a non-starter like i'm gonna take years and uh yeah i think you know i think we basically just like i think at this point we're at peace with the fact that like for a bunch of work the best way to use granola is it to use it to ingest the context you know and use it during the meetings but then it's like powering workflows off in all kinds of other apps because it's connected to your internal agent or forward or chat jibouti or whatever yeah exactly yeah i mean there's always going to be like uh more normal users who just use the ui right but like for even as a solopreneur for me like granola has super useful context but also have a bunch of context in google docs and other sources so like the power is combining all that stuff together like helping the ai understand

  3. 15:27

    everything yeah yeah yeah it is it is it's like it's um as the context you give it right and the amount of connections and stuff you have um yeah yeah i'm excited to do a lot more of that like but the pre-meaning briefs was great for us because I guess it forced us to build a bunch of infrastructure under the hood to make Grinnell good at sifting through emails to find the right thing. And a lot of that has been built in a certain way so that we can make that work for other tools too, you know, Slack and CRMs and everywhere else your company has like a...

  4. 16:01

    Yeah, dude, there's so much opportunity, man. Like you can do like a weekly brief, like weekly meeting brief, or like you can do like a post-meeting insight brief. There's so much. You can do so much briefs. It'll be amazing.