Michael Krantz

I’m a writer and editor with long experience working in highly collaborative environments, from Time to Google to Notion to endless freelance, turning complex technology ideas into lovely, human-friendly prose.

Tech copy can be beautiful.

Dialpad (2024-2025)

Dialpad •

GenAI for the People: The IT Guide to Scalable AI Infrastructure | Dialpad

Ship all three together or you’ll bottleneck every downstream use case.Establish a governed, interoperable data foundation—lakehouse, lineage, and vector access—so analytics, ML, and GenAI workloads draw from consistent, well‑controlled sources.Lakehouse ≥ warehouse: Adopt an open-table-format lakehouse (Delta, Iceberg, Hudi) so analytics, feature engineering, and vectorization share one source of truth.Column- & row-level lineageEmit metadata (OpenLineage, Marquez) from every pipeline—ETL, ELT,...
Dialpad •

GenAI for the People: A Framework for AI Transformation | Dialpad

ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, and Ai has held the spotlight ever since. Sure, we’re seeing “Ai fatigue” in some corners. But serious curiosity and heavy investment from entrepreneurs, managers, and specialists is stronger than ever. My inbox is living proof. Every week I field a steady stream of questions about how individuals, teams, and companies can make the leap to an “Ai-first” mindset. It’s a big question. In this post I’ll offer an answer: a framework you can apply to your or...
Dialpad •

How Dialpad CSRs Use AI-Powered Tools to Deliver Human-Centered Support | Dialpad

At Dialpad, our customer service representatives (CSRs) support users using the same platform they work in every day. That means they’re not just helping customers navigate Dialpad—they’re living in it themselves, using the same tools, workflows, and features. But they’re doing so in a fast-changing customer service landscape. Ai has introduced powerful new ways to resolve issues more quickly and at greater scale, but it’s also raised the bar. Callers expect fast, accurate answers and personaliz...
Dialpad •

Building Ai’s Bronze Age: Dialpad's Vision for the Future of Business Communications | Dialpad

As we improve our ability to explain Dialpad CSAT scores, we're using Ai to automatically detect call center issues and generate explanations, including titles, summaries, suggested actions, and counts. This ability to understand a meeting’s topics and scoring is a big deal, but it’s also just the beginning. We’ve already released Ai CSAT, an Ai-calculated customer satisfaction score (a big deal in its own right, given the low survey response rates). But our customers (and their employees actual...
Dialpad •

Beyond the black box the long journey that led to Ai CSAT Explanations | Dialpad

At Dialpad, we’ve included CSAT scores as part of our call center platform for years by prompting customers to rate their experience after the call. But only a small percentage of people‌ respond to post-call surveys, and those who do respond tend to give highly polarized scores—mostly 1s or 5s. This lopsided distribution doesn’t mean most callers loved or hated their call; it means that callers who loved or hated their call are more likely to care enough to answer the survey. All the 2, 3, and...
Dialpad •

State of the Contact Center 2025 | Dialpad

One thing you notice when you work in Ai software development is that this world moves fast. A springtime experiment is table stakes by autumn. Yet even as lots of vendors are moving onto the next big thing (agentic), lots of companies are still trying to figure out the current thing (GenAi). At Dialpad we’re in the middle of this cyclone. We were early to the Ai race and we remain committed to offering one of the industry’s most advanced Ai-powered platforms for customer communications, today a...

Notion (2022-2024)

Notion •

First look at Notion charts (and what our users really think)

Databases hold lots of, well, data. But for data to tell a story, you need to add a little bit of color.

Databases hold lots of, well, data. But for data to tell a story, you need to add a little bit of color.

That’s why we launched charts, a one-click way to bring any Notion database into rich visual life.

That’s why we launched charts, a one-click way to bring any Notion database into rich visual life.

We tried to make our bar, graph, and donut charts as simple and utilitarian as possible....
Notion •

Notion AI is adding Slack to its workplace search, with Google Drive, Jira, Salesforce and more on the way.

The meditation app Serene recently conducted an experiment to quantify Slack’s impact on focus. Their app designer, Ben, wore an electroencephalogram cap while experiencing various levels of Slack interruption, from a persistent icon in his dock to a red dot that blinked and made noise. The results were clear: the more intrusive the interruption, the more Ben’s focus suffered. “In all instances,” the report summarized, “Ben’s focus declined immediately after receiving a Slack notification and co...
Notion •

Leader of Notion AI engineering discusses how to promote flexibility, humility, clarity and speed in product development.

It’s late and I appear to be stuck. I’m in the school library. I should go home and get some sleep, but I’m still working on my math problem set. I’ve tried solving it in so many different ways that anyone watching would think I’m hopelessly lost. But actually, I’m more engaged than ever.

It’s late and I appear to be stuck. I’m in the school library. I should go home and get some sleep, but I’m still working on my math problem set. I’ve tried solving it in so many different ways that anyone wat...
Notion •

Lessons we learned from launching Notion AI

But the sprint to get to market first required some tradeoffs, and we learned a lot along the way. Here’s a look at our evolving go-to-market strategies for Notion AI — what we got right, what we got wrong, and some hard-won wisdom we earned in the process.

But the sprint to get to market first required some tradeoffs, and we learned a lot along the way. Here’s a look at our evolving go-to-market strategies for Notion AI — what we got right, what we got wrong, and some hard-won wisdom we earn...
Notion •

How to write great AI prompts

Large language models (LLMs) like Notion AI, ChatGPT and Llama use datasets comprising vast amounts of language — the equivalent of millions of books, web pages, and so on. They turn each word (or parts of a word) in these billions of sentences into a token, then rank every token according to how often it’s used next to every other token in that dataset.

Large language models (LLMs) like Notion AI, ChatGPT and Llama use datasets comprising vast amounts of language — the equivalent of millions o...
Notion •

How Notion AI protects user privacy and user data and enhances user trust when people use generative AI

Most people think about data security when they consider the question. But the rise of generative AI (GenAI) presents a new set of trust challenges, both for developers and anyone who uses the products they develop. When you prompt a GenAI model, you’re giving decision-making power to software that works differently than any that came before it. Given these generative models’ built-in randomness, can you trust it to do the right thing, and to do so reliably? What does the ‘right thing’ even mean...
Notion •

The design thinking behind Notion AI

When people use Notion, we want it to “just work” — everything should happen the way you want it to. In its ideal state, Notion is one AI-connected workspace that evolves to suit your content and habits by putting the right tools in front of you, right when you need them.

When people use Notion, we want it to “just work” — everything should happen the way you want it to. In its ideal state, Notion is one AI-connected workspace that evolves to suit your content and habits by putting the right to...
Notion •

AI in business: how the newest tech is about to change your job

All three reactions are understandable. In 2022 the global AI market was worth $136.6 billion and was expected to reach $1.81 trillion by 2030. Those projections can only have grown with the rise of ChatGPT and generative AI. This new technology has changed the fortunes of entire companies, from security tech giant Palintir to software toolmaker Unity. ChatGPT’s creator, the hitherto-non-profit OpenAI, is now eyeing a very-for-profit $29 billion valuation; chipmaking giant and AI pioneer NVidia...
Notion •

Exploring the Future of AI: GPT & Beyond | Notion

Computer scientists have been dreaming up, working toward, investing in, and warning about artificial intelligence for about as long as there have been computer scientists. But for all those years, as the industry pursued various avenues toward AI, from parallel processing to neural networks, the question of whether what most people would consider ‘true AI’ would ever come about has remained an open one.

Computer scientists have been dreaming up, working toward, investing in, and warning about...

Google (2014-2017, 2019-2022)

Google Cloud •

Cloud for Retail and Commerce

We’re on a mission to help retailers easily leverage AI throughout their organizations and gain real-time insights from their data.The world’s leading brands are partnering with Google Cloud to thrive in this ever-changing landscape.

We’re on a mission to help retailers easily leverage AI throughout their organizations and gain real-time insights from their data.

The world’s leading brands are partnering with Google Cloud to thrive in this ever-changing landscape.

Google Gulp

Quench
your thirst for knowledge.

At Google our mission is to organize the world's information and make it
useful and accessible to our users. But any piece of information's usefulness
derives, to a depressing degree, from the cognitive ability of the user who's
using it. That's why we're pleased to announce Google Gulp (BETA)™ with
Auto-Drink™ (LIMITED RELEASE), a line of "smart drinks" designed
to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent,...
Vox •

A longtime Google creative lead is heading to genomics startup Color

Michael Krantz is leaving his 13-year Google career to head editorial at genomics startup Color.He’ll be joining former Googlers Othman Laraki and Elad Gil, the company’s co-founders, and Katie Stanton, its CMO, at what is one of several health care tech startups launched by members of the Google diaspora. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson, head of engineering at Alphabet health care subsidiary Verily, are investors.Krantz joined Google months before the company’s IPO in 2004, as the comp...

Let's connect mkrantz@gmail.com