The collaborative productivity application Notion is getting a boost in AI power.
Instead of simply answering questions and offering basic assistance, a built-in AI tool called Notion Agent will now be able to conduct research, draft detailed documents, and set up or update custom Notion databases on demand.
“Essentially, it can do everything that humans can do inside Notion,” says Notion cofounder and COO Akshay Kothari.
In a demo for Fast Company, Kothari showed how Notion Agent could pull user feedback on a new product from multiple sources, generating a well-cited report with recommendations for future updates. It could also create a database of articles from a news site. The software can handle operations like assigning tasks to team members at the start of a new project or updating a company knowledge base with new information.
Notion Personal Agent [Gif: Courtesy of Notion]
To do all this, Notion Agent can access data from the web, information already stored in Notion, and integrations with platforms such as Slack, Zendesk, and Google Drive—all while respecting security settings and permissions from the linked applications.
Once content is generated, users can edit it themselves or ask the AI to make changes. Often, Kothari says, people let the AI handle the busywork before applying the finishing touches.
Kothari refers to the agentic AI-enabled product as Notion 3.0, essentially calling the new technology a leap on par with the previous addition of databases and workflows—Notion 2.0—and its initial launch in 2016 as a tool primarily for building and sharing documents.
Like other Notion features, the AI is highly customizable. Users can choose from personas such as “sidekick” or “analyst,” and they can edit or completely rewrite a profile document that defines how the AI should behave. That includes everything from context on how to answer certain questions to stylistic tweaks in tone. Users can also ask the AI itself to adjust aspects of its behavior—and even pick from a variety of logo designs to represent Notion’s AI features.
Custom Agents [Gif: Courtesy of Notion]
The company is also testing a feature it calls Custom Agents, which are designed for specific purposes, like regularly updating a document or database based on specific information. Custom Agents can be configured to run at regular time intervals or in response to certain external triggers, and they can even be set up with instructions crafted with the aid of the general purpose Notion Agent.
Internally, Kothari says, the company already uses some Custom Agents to handle questions and feedback posted in Slack, responding itself when appropriate and sometimes routing messages to the appropriate humans through instructions that can be modified over time.
Notion plans to soon begin testing Custom Agents with a few hundred customers, in part to determine how they’re used and how they should be priced, before making them available to the general user base. So far, Kothari says, the Custom Agents—configured to run on a regular schedule or frequently triggered by events like Slack inquiries—appear to generate significantly more AI utilization than the ordinary Notion Agent, which only takes action in response to user queries within the main platform.
“I think that’s an area that we’re gonna really study in the coming weeks and months and then figure out how we can roll it out to all our customers,” says Kothari.
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