Most business owners I speak to have tried ChatGPT at least once. Some use it daily. But there is a frustration I keep hearing over and over again — especially from SME owners who tried using AI for something specific to their business:

“The answer sounded right, but it was wrong.”

That is the hallucination problem. And it is not a small inconvenience. When you are using AI to research compliance requirements, draft product documentation, or prepare training materials — a confidently wrong answer is worse than no answer at all.

I have been exploring AI tools seriously for the past year, both for my own use and to understand what actually makes sense for the SMEs we work with at Authentic Venture Sdn Bhd. And recently, one tool stopped me in my tracks.

It is called NotebookLM. It is free. It is made by Google. And it solves the hallucination problem in a way that most other AI tools do not even try to address.

What Is NotebookLM?

NotebookLM is an AI-powered research and note-taking tool developed by Google. Unlike general-purpose AI assistants, NotebookLM does not pull information from the broader internet or rely on its training data to answer your questions.

Instead, it works exclusively from the sources you provide.

You upload your own documents — PDFs, Word files, Google Docs, even website links or YouTube video URLs — and NotebookLM uses only those materials as its knowledge base. Every answer it gives you is grounded in your sources. It will even tell you exactly which part of which document an answer came from.

This is a fundamentally different approach to AI, and for business use, it is significantly more reliable.

Why Hallucinations Are a Real Business Risk

Before we go further, let me be clear about what hallucinations actually mean in the context of AI.

When a tool like ChatGPT does not know the answer to something, it does not say “I don’t know.” It generates a plausible-sounding answer based on patterns in its training data. The answer can be grammatically perfect, confidently stated, and completely fabricated.

For casual use, this is annoying but manageable. You fact-check and move on.

But for business owners, the stakes are different. Imagine:

• Using an AI to summarise your tax compliance obligations — and getting an answer that mixes up SST and GST rules
• Asking it to explain your own product features — and having it invent capabilities your product does not have
• Training a new staff member using AI-generated content — that contains inaccurate information

These are not hypothetical. These things happen when business owners use general AI tools without understanding their limitations.

NotebookLM sidesteps this problem entirely by not being a general AI. It is a your-documents AI. It only knows what you tell it.

5 Practical Ways Malaysian SME Owners Can Use NotebookLM

1. Grounded Research on Regulatory and Compliance Topics

Malaysian SME owners deal with a lot of regulatory complexity — SST filings, MyInvois e-invoicing requirements, EPF and SOCSO updates, PDPA compliance. The rules change, and the details matter.

With NotebookLM, you can upload the actual documents — the official circulars, LHDN guidelines, or compliance checklists your accountant shared with you — and then ask questions directly from those materials. The AI will answer based on what the documents say, not what it thinks they probably say.

This is especially useful for preparing for meetings with accountants or legal advisors. Come in with your own research, grounded in the actual source material.

2. Auto-Generating Sales Training Slide Decks

This is the feature that genuinely surprised me.

NotebookLM can generate a full slide deck based on the materials you upload. Here is how I would use this for an SME sales team:

• Upload your product brochure, pricing sheet, and FAQ document
• Ask NotebookLM to generate a sales training presentation
• It produces a structured, accurate slide deck based entirely on your materials

What used to take a sales manager half a day to put together can now be done in minutes. And because it is sourced from your own documents, the content is accurate — not a hallucinated version of what your product might do.

This is the kind of time-saving that has real impact on a small team where everyone is already wearing multiple hats.

3. Building Staff Onboarding Materials

If you have SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) documented somewhere — even in a Word file or a Google Doc — you can upload those into NotebookLM and ask it to turn them into training materials.

Ask it to generate:

• A summary of key procedures for new staff
• A Q&A study guide based on your SOP
• A slide presentation for onboarding sessions

This works especially well if your SOPs are detailed but dense. NotebookLM can extract the essential points and reformat them for easier consumption.

4. Research Synthesis Across Multiple Documents

If you regularly read industry reports, client proposals, or market research, you know how time-consuming it is to synthesise information across multiple long documents.

NotebookLM lets you upload all of them together and then ask cross-document questions:

• “What are the common themes across these three industry reports?”
• “Summarise the key differences between these two supplier proposals”
• “What does our Q1 sales report say about the product categories that underperformed?”

It will answer from the documents you uploaded and cite its sources. This alone can save several hours of reading and note-taking per week.

5. Preparing for Client Meetings and Presentations

Before an important client pitch, upload everything relevant — your company profile, the client’s publicly available information, your proposal draft, and any reference case studies. Then use NotebookLM to generate:

• A summary of the key points you want to make
• Likely questions the client might ask, based on the materials
• A slide deck framework for the presentation

You walk into the meeting better prepared, and the preparation took a fraction of the usual time.

NotebookLM vs ChatGPT: Which Should You Use?

This is a question worth answering directly, because both tools have their place.

	NotebookLM	ChatGPT
Best for	Working with your own documents and data	General knowledge, brainstorming, writing
Accuracy	High — grounded in your sources	Variable — can hallucinate
Internet access	No (works from uploaded sources only)	Yes (with web browsing enabled)
Cost	Free	Free tier + paid plans
Slide generation	Yes, from your documents	Limited
Source citations	Yes, cites the exact document	No

The short answer: use NotebookLM when the accuracy of the answer depends on specific documents or your own business content. Use ChatGPT for open-ended tasks where you want creative output or broad knowledge.

For most day-to-day SME tasks — training materials, compliance research, client prep — NotebookLM is the more reliable choice.

How to Get Started with NotebookLM

Getting started takes less than 10 minutes:

1. Go to notebooklm.google.com
2. Sign in with your Google account
3. Create a new Notebook
4. Upload your sources — PDFs, Google Docs, website links, YouTube URLs
5. Start asking questions in the chat interface on the right

That is it. There is no complex setup. No paid subscription required for the core features. Just upload your documents and start working.

A Note on How This Fits Into a Bigger System

Tools like NotebookLM are powerful on their own. But where they become truly transformative is when they sit on top of a well-organised business foundation.

At Authentic Venture, the SMEs we work with are building that foundation – structured financial data, streamlined HR processes, automated invoicing through MyInvois, inventory management that actually reflects reality. When your core business operations are running on a reliable system, every productivity tool you add on top of it multiplies in value.

An AI tool is only as useful as the documents and data you feed it. If your SOPs are scattered across WhatsApp messages, your product info lives in someone’s email draft, and your financials are in a spreadsheet no one has updated since March – the AI cannot help you much.

Build the system first. Then the tools work for you, not the other way around.

Final Thoughts

NotebookLM is one of the most practically useful AI tools I have come across for SME business owners — precisely because it does less than most AI tools. It does not try to know everything. It only knows what you teach it.

And that constraint is exactly what makes it trustworthy.

If you have been hesitant about adopting AI in your business because you are not sure you can trust the outputs — NotebookLM is a good place to start. Upload one document. Ask it one question. See how it works.

You might be surprised how quickly it earns a permanent spot in your weekly workflow.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Is NotebookLM free to use?

Yes. NotebookLM is free to use with a Google account. Google also offers NotebookLM Plus as a paid tier with higher usage limits, but the core features — including document upload, Q&A, and slide generation — are available on the free plan.

Q: Does NotebookLM work with Bahasa Malaysia documents?

Yes. NotebookLM can process documents written in Bahasa Malaysia. You can upload Malay-language PDFs or documents and ask questions in either English or Bahasa Malaysia. The quality of responses may vary depending on how clearly the source documents are written, but it does support multilingual content.

Q: How many documents can I upload to NotebookLM?

On the free plan, you can upload up to 50 sources per notebook. Each source can be a PDF, a Google Doc, a copied text, a website link, or a YouTube video URL. For most SME use cases, this is more than sufficient.

Q: Is my uploaded data private and secure?

Google states that your NotebookLM data is not used to train their AI models. However, as with any cloud-based tool, you should exercise caution about uploading highly sensitive or confidential business documents. For general business documents, training materials, and product information, the privacy risk is minimal. Always review Google’s current privacy policy for the most up-to-date information.

Q: Can NotebookLM replace a human researcher or content writer?

No — and it is not designed to. NotebookLM is a tool that helps you work more efficiently with information you already have. It synthesises, summarises, and reformats. It does not generate original insights, strategic recommendations, or creative content the way a skilled human does. Think of it as a very fast, very accurate reading assistant.

Q: How is NotebookLM different from asking ChatGPT to read a document?

When you paste a document into ChatGPT, it reads it — but it may also mix in information from its training data when generating responses. NotebookLM is architecturally designed to use only the documents you upload. It is built for source-grounded responses, which makes it more reliable when accuracy matters.

Q: I run a small business in Malaysia. Is this tool relevant for me?

Absolutely. In fact, NotebookLM is particularly well-suited to SME owners in Malaysia who manage compliance documents, train small teams, and need to prepare client-facing materials regularly. The time savings on slide creation and document research alone can make a meaningful difference in a lean team.

It is the first working day in 2022 and it has been quite a hectic day =)

Year 2020 and 2021 has been a challenging year for all of us – for majority of companies worldwide. With the pandemic, and major shifts in how businesses are run, companies can no longer afford to stay still or take a “wait-and-see” strategy. It has been a fast year – either you’re on the bandwagon, or you’re going to be left behind.

Technology has become something very important, very crucial. It is no longer just a tool – it’s an integral part of the organisation – from back office tasks to generating revenue for the company. OfficeCentral has grown from providing back office solutions for our customers such as HR, Payroll and Accounting, to modules that focus on generating revenue for the companies.

The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed us, all of us, to embrace technology – it does not matter whether you’re a business, or an individual. During the difficult time, technology has enabled us to continue our businesses and communicate with our family and friends. And technology is here to stay (Although, we hope Covid-19 will go away).

At Authentic Venture Sdn Bhd, we start the year 2022 with a huge restructuring in the company. It has been our dreams to move the company to the next level, and the restructuring is done with this in mind. We are putting forward our best, so that we can deliver the best to our customers and stakeholders. We want to deliver the best to you.

Alhamdulillah, effective today, I am the new Chief Executive Officer of Authentic Venture Sdn Bhd. It is a huge responsibility, and a huge challenge for me. Our former CEO, Ir Aziz Ismail, will be moving up to be the Executive Chairman of the company.

With these changes, there will be a lot of work to be done. Pray for us!

We believe that in order to go far, we will have to work hard together – And I am looking forward to working with you, our partners, our customers and more in order to provide the best to you and to be the best in the industry. As per our motto, your success is our success.

Thank you.

business #business #technology #thankyou #work #leadership #success #growth #strategy #ceo #officecentral #authenticventure #authenticventuresdnbhd

Each person is different from another person. What we can observe is a person’s behavior – how we behave, how we talk and do something. However, what actually make up a person’s behavior conststs of several factors which are not visible.

Much like the iceberg below:

Our knowledge and skills, attitude and values, beliefs and personality are the factors that make up our behavior. These are the reasons why we act the way we do, and why one person is different from another.

Let us go into detail on Personality factor that influences our behavior.

Personality is…

• relatively stable across different situations;
• enduring across time; and
• expressed through patterns of behaviours that distinguish one person from another.

From our own observation, we can actually see / describe the personality of people close to us, as it actually relatively consistent across context.

We also normally observe that certain personality types gets along well with certain types of personality.

Personality differences, for example, can lead to interpersonal antagonism, which can stymie the formation of productive teams. However, the appropriate balance of personalities can lead to the formation of effective teams.

In the personality theories, there are 2 major approach:

1. Nomothetic approach: This approach strongly supports the view that personalities are fixed and determined by heredity, and cannot be significantly influenced by environmental factors.
   
2. Idiographic approach: This approach takes the opposite perspective – It recognizes that individuals do have unique innate charateristics, it also suggests that personality can be moulded and that both personality and behavior and influeced by specific environmental experiences.

(Organisational Behaviour, Individuals, Groups and Organisations by Ian Brooks)

There are various studies on personality, which I will share in my next post. By understanding this and how to apply this in your hiring and team development, it will greatly help you and your team to achieve better fit and becoming more productive team.

Today I am feeling a bit patriotic.

I love my country, Malaysia.

Malaysia is great. And I believe all of us Malaysians are striving so that we can always improve and be the best version we can ever be. So that Malaysia can be the best country we can ever be.

I always believe Malaysia is the best country to live in, to build my family, to give my children the best environment to grow in.

I hope I can contribute to helping Malaysia to be better too.

When I was younger, someone said to me “Don’t ask what your country have done for you. But ask, what have you done for your country?”.

I felt that I have not achieved much in my past 35 years of life. But I hope every single step I took and will take, will be towards achieving my dreams – of contributing to Malaysia and to the Muslims all over the world. To bring up my beloved country to be the best, and to help all the Muslims wherever they are.

This has been my ambition, and it will always be.

Let’s work together to grow Malaysia together. It’s our future. It’s our children’s future.

Selamat Hari Kemerdekaan yang ke – 64, Negaraku Malaysia.

A few years back, I used to visit counsellors to get counselling sessions. Those years were very challenging years as I was tested not only in work-related areas, but also friendships, financial and more.

The first counsellor I met, opened my eyes to the world of counselling. From that day onwards, I believe counselling plays a big role in mental and emotional health.

During the first session, one of the question that was asked to me,

“What if you were an apple tree?”

Person A came to you and water you. How would you respond?
Person B came to you and climbed you to get the apples. How would you respond?
Person C threw sticks at you to get the apples. How would you respond?

As a normal human being, of course I feel like throwing sticks back at Person C. Haha.

But, as an apple tree, our objective is actually to produce apples. So, who cares what other people do? Why do we need to retaliate or respond negatively when we perceive other people as treating us negatively? Sometimes that’s the only way that they know how to get something or to get response from us.

Person A came. We give them good apples.
Person B came. We give them good apples.
Person C came. We give them good apples.

At the time when Person D came with an axe to chop us down, Person A, B and C will inform that we produce good apples and stop us from being cut down.

This story opened my eyes. Why do we treat people like how we feel they treated us? No matter how they treat us, we should always treat them well.

Sometimes, this is easier said than done. As usual, to develop a new habit, you need to consciously make the good decision, until it comes naturally to you.

Alhamdulillah, the multiple counselling sessions I had attended over a course of few years managed to help pull me out from depression that I faced at that time.

I know, sometimes I tend to forget the teachings and reacted like any normal person would. But as always, I try to reflect back to the counselling sessions and remember all the helpful councillors.

I am grateful.

If you are constantly sad, stressed or depressed, and have never met with a counsellor before, you should.

counselling #apples #react #positive