The Signal

People are letting software handle meeting notes now. Not everyone, not everywhere—but enough to show up clearly in search behavior and workplace tooling.

This has been building since 2020, accelerating after ChatGPT made AI feel accessible to non-technical people.

It’s not one company or product. It’s a category-level shift showing up across multiple tools and workflows.

A few things changed at once.

Speech-to-text got good enough that it stopped being annoying. Remote work meant way more meetings. And people hit a wall—there’s only so much you can write down while also trying to think.

Meetings didn’t slow down.
Attention did.

This isn’t really about productivity tools. It’s about survival.

What you’re seeing here is the quiet outsourcing of memory itself, because attention became the thing you can’t afford to waste.

AI note-taking helps explain how work is adapting to:

Even if you never use these tools, it explains why they keep showing up.

This does not mean:

Like most workplace tools, adoption may plateau, fragment, or remain situational.

Notice

This is best treated as awareness. File it away as an example of how work is quietly adapting to attention limits.

No action required.

This signal is anchored to observable, multi-year behavior.

Primary evidence

Multi-year interest supports this as a durable pattern rather than a short-term spike.

Helpful context
Short timeframes exaggerate noise. Longer windows help distinguish what’s growing from what’s merely spiking.

You don’t need to click these links for the signal to matter. Seeing them once is sufficient.

If you’re curious—and only for context—these are representative examples of tools people mention in this space:

These aren’t recommendations or a list to evaluate. They’re included to make the pattern more concrete. You don’t need to explore any of them to get value from this signal.

Exploding Signals helps you spot patterns early — with zero obligation to act on any of it.