AI Engines will Take Note-Taking Applications to the Next Level
Supercharge your notes into real-life decision-making & insights
This last year, some of the biggest developments in note-taking applications have happened. Tools like Roam, Obsidian, and even Notion now are introducing bi-directional linking and features that can really weave notes together to make them even more useful.
Productivity software would become the chassis makers.
And AI companies would become the engines.
However, now we’re connecting notes, we’re only just getting started…
I believe note-taking in the next 5 years will get a real boost to make notes the most valuable information that we have in our pockets.
Plugging in your engine
Much like many others watching Iron Man gets me excited. Having a Jarvis style operating system to understand and help your decision-making would be life-changing and aspirational.
Right now, we’re nowhere near that.

But imagine, if, we didn’t rely on applications like Notion, Roam and Evernote to build the machine learning abilities, but allow us to connect to a provider of our own choice in the next few years.
Take Roam for example. You have every note, every checklist and every upcoming date within it. And you choose a provider like IBM Watson to plug it into. Once you connect it to that service, it then comes alive.
Examples:
- Google AI (Engine) + Evernote (Chassis)
- Notion (Chassis) + IBM Watson (Engine) = Dashboard
Helping you to make complex decisions, recommends how you organize your week and brings up more relevant notes that’ll impact the way you think based on past learnings.
Productivity software would become the chassis makers.
And AI companies would become the engines.
This is how I see the future of productivity software evolving.
Like Social Media
Productivity applications would become the new social media tools, the more notes you add, the more value you gain and the more history you compile the better suited recommendations you’d be getting.
In 2008, we saw the surge of social media.
In 2025–2030, we’ll surely see the surge of data-driven knowledge.
And for the armies of people who have already been building their notes over the years and drawing the attention into self-reflection and learning, this will become quite the spectacle.