Granola is an AI notetaking app that has spread fast through the technology industry, and lately well beyond it. If you work at an architecture firm, someone in your studio is probably already using it for their own notes, and sooner or later a principal asks whether the firm should adopt it for project meetings. This guide is for that question, and it applies the firm's standard: can a tool carry the documentation duties an architect holds during construction administration?
What Granola is
Granola is a personal AI notetaker. It runs on your computer and, in its own words, "uses your computer audio, so doesn't invite a bot." No participant joins the call, and the app turns your rough typed notes plus the transcript into a clean, structured summary. It works across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, covers in-person conversations, and has built a reputation for output quality and for staying out of the meeting's way. Its MCP connector links your notes to Claude and other AI tools, which is what the current wave of attention is about.
Two design choices explain much of its popularity. First, no bot joins the call. Participants see nothing, which removes the awkwardness of a visible notetaker and the permission dance that comes with it. Second, it is built for the individual, so adopting it requires no one's approval but your own.
Both choices read differently inside an architecture firm than in the industries where Granola grew up.
The architect's meeting load splits by documentation duty
During active projects, the meetings on an architect's calendar carry very different documentation duties:
- Internal and consultant coordination: design reviews, redline sessions, structural and MEP coordination calls. Notes here are working notes. If they are lost, the drawings still exist.
- The OAC meeting: the recurring owner-architect-contractor meeting during construction. Its minutes are contract correspondence. The architect traditionally drafts and issues them during construction administration, in the firm's template, with the firm's liability language. They are the record that gets examined when a change order or delay claim is disputed.
- Meetings that move paperwork: submittal review sessions, RFI clarification calls with the contractor, punch list walk-throughs at closeout. What is said in these meetings becomes formal responses with contractual response windows attached.
- Site visits: observations during construction that become the design team's field reports, the periodic counterpart to the contractor's daily report.
Any evaluation of a notetaking tool for an architecture firm has to say which of these meetings it is for. Most of the confusion around tools like Granola comes from answering for the first category and assuming the answer covers the rest.
What to evaluate, for any tool
Five criteria cover what a firm, as opposed to a person, needs from meeting documentation:
- Consent and client permissibility. Some owners do not allow AI tools in project meetings, and some jurisdictions require all-party consent for recording. The firms that navigate this well use tools whose presence in the meeting is visible, and whose data handling they can state to a client in one paragraph. An invisible capture method is convenient for the user and complicated for the firm. Nobody else in the OAC meeting knows software is taking notes.
- Output in the firm's format. OAC minutes leave the firm as issued documents: template, numbering, distribution list, liability language. A summary that reads well still has to become minutes the firm can issue, and closing that gap by hand is exactly the intern-hour problem firms are trying to eliminate.
- Where the record lives. Minutes, decisions, and the correspondence around them belong to the project record, the same document control discipline that governs drawings and transmittals. Notes that live in one architect's personal app leave the firm when that architect does, and cannot be produced in a dispute five years later. This is the boundary between a notetaker and project information management.
- Connection to the project's instruments. Action items from an OAC meeting become RFI responses with contract deadlines, submittal chases, and change order paperwork. Captured decisions earn their keep by reaching those logs. A decision that stays inside a summary nobody reopens is lost to the project.
- Security posture, stated flat. Where audio and transcripts are stored, whether data trains AI models, and what certifications back the answers. Architecture firms answer to clients on this; individuals rarely have to.
Where Granola fits at an architecture firm
Measured against those criteria, Granola does one job well. It lets one architect keep good personal notes with almost no effort. For internal design reviews, consultant coordination, one-on-ones, and the general run of calls where the notes are for you, it is excellent, and the people at your firm using it are not wrong. The MCP connector extends that value for personal workflows, and asking Claude questions across your own meeting history gets more useful as that history grows.
The fit ends at the meetings that produce contract documentation. Granola describes its notes as "private by default, easy to share if you choose," and it has grown sharing and team use around that model. The record still lives in Granola, in Granola's format, produced through a capture method the other participants in the room do not see. On the free tier, notes older than 30 days require a paid plan to access. A firm's contract documentation cannot inherit any of those properties. For a design review that is fine. For an OAC meeting, where the minutes are the contract record and the owner's and contractor's copies must match the firm's issued version, each of those properties becomes a problem. Client permissibility is the sharpest edge. Firms we have spoken with increasingly field owner policies on AI in project meetings, and an invisible notetaker is the hardest case to clear with a conservative client.
Granola is working as designed here, and the design serves the individual professional well. The firm's record sits outside its scope.
Where the firm needs more
For the meetings that produce contract documentation, the requirements invert. The notetaker should be visible and removable, so consent is real and demonstrable. The output should land in the firm's own minutes template, ready to issue. The record belongs in the project, next to the email, the RFI log, and the submittal register, and it should stay there when staff change. Action items need to flow into the logs that track them against their response windows.
That is the category Cogram sits in, with meeting minutes as one product inside a project information record built for architects and engineers. Since this is our product, we will state the claims plainly and let you test them: Cogram drafts OAC minutes in your firm's templates, and its notetaker joins meetings visibly and can be removed by any participant. Meeting records file to the project alongside email and documents, field observations dictated on site become formatted reports in your template, and no customer data trains AI models. Security posture: SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant, with SSO and role-based access controls.
The test, for us or anyone, is to take one real OAC meeting, run your current process and the tool in parallel, and compare what each produces at the point of issue. If your most important workflow is minute production in your template, test exactly that. If it is client consent, ask the vendor to describe their capture method in writing and show it to your most conservative owner.
Can a firm use both?
Yes, and some will. The sensible division matches how the tools are built: personal notetakers for personal notes, record-grade tooling for the meetings that produce project documentation. The failure mode to avoid is drift, where OAC minutes quietly become one architect's Granola summary pasted into the firm's Word template. The output may look similar for a while. The consent trail, the template discipline, and the record location will not, and a disputed change order five years on is when the difference surfaces.
Frequently asked questions
Is Granola good for architects? For personal notes, yes. It is a well-built personal AI notetaker, and architects use it the way professionals in any industry do: design reviews, coordination calls, notes for yourself. For OAC minutes, field reports, and the rest of the construction administration record, its personal-by-design model does not meet what a firm needs from contract documentation.
Can Granola write OAC meeting minutes? It can summarize an OAC meeting the user attends. What it does not do is produce minutes in the firm's issued format, capture with the visible consent of the owner and contractor, or file the record to the project. Those three properties are what give OAC minutes their standing as contract documentation.
Can architects use Granola in client meetings? That is a firm policy question before it is a tool question. By its own description Granola "uses your computer audio, so doesn't invite a bot," so other participants are unaware notes are being taken by software. Some owners prohibit AI tools in project meetings outright; check the client's policy and your jurisdiction's consent rules before using any capture tool in an external meeting.
What is the difference between Granola and Cogram for an architecture firm? Granola is a personal notetaker: invisible capture, notes for the individual, polished summaries. Cogram is an AEC platform: a visible, removable notetaker, OAC minutes drafted in the firm's template, records filed to the project alongside email, RFIs, and submittals, plus field reports and project search. They answer different questions, and the overlap is smaller than it first looks.
What do architecture firms use for meeting minutes during construction administration? Traditionally, a project architect drafts minutes from notes into the firm's template, which is the time cost firms are trying to remove. Tools built for the job draft the minutes in the firm's format from a visibly captured meeting and file them to the project record. Evaluate against the five criteria above; the category to search is AI meeting minutes for AEC, or more broadly project information management.
Are there alternatives to Granola? For personal notetaking, several established products compete directly, differing mainly on capture method and price. For firm-level meeting documentation in architecture and engineering, the comparison set changes: the useful question is which system of record the firm keeps, and which tools feed it. Decide which question you are asking before comparing tools.
We build Cogram. If your firm is working out its policy on AI in project meetings, a 25-minute demo covers how visible capture, firm templates, and the project record work in practice; the meeting privacy page states our data handling in full, and the AEC glossary defines the documentation terms this guide leans on.