Notion AI Agent Deep Dive
Notion AI's most powerful capability is its ability to access your entire workspace, connected apps (Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, and more), and web search while leveraging the latest LLMs (OpenAI, Claude by Anthropic). Combined with ever-learning custom personas/instructions, it can answer queries, extract insights, and create/update/delete content throughout your Notion workspace.
This functionality becomes especially valuable if you've used Notion for some time and accumulated accurate data. No matter how scattered this information might be, Notion AI can now help you make decisions, understand past patterns, and take actions across your workspace.
Of course, the usual AI cautions, limitations, and concerns still apply. In this post, I'm focusing on the latest Notion AI capabilities, which represent a significant leap forward for both Notion AI and the Notion product overall. I've had early access to these features for more than a month before launch, informing my experience and opinion.
I've been using Notion AI extensively, creating custom instructions for specific purposes (e.g., marketing strategist, business coach, data analyst). My clients who use Notion are now eagerly building with AI as a primary feature rather than just an added benefit.
Notion AI includes inline text editing and generation on any page (with modest quality improvements from better LLMs), plus chat interfaces. This post and video concentrate on the Notion AI chat interface, where these new features are available. We call these feature sets "Agent", reflecting Notion AI's new ability to take actions across your workspace. Previously, it could only respond to queries in the chat.
Set AI Instructionss
First, Notion AI Agent can adopt different personas. These are custom, self-learning characters (prompts) that shape how Notion AI works—essentially defining the AI's "personality." When chatting with Notion AI, you can select one instruction at a time.
You can create unlimited instructions. Currently, each instruction exists as a Notion page in the "Private" section of your left sidebar. This means workspace users maintain their own personal instructions, without the ability to share them. The Notion team is working on improvements to allow more flexibility in organizing AI instructions.
Instructions function like prompts in traditional LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.). You specify constraints, personality traits, and other parameters for the AI to consider during your interaction.
In Notion, an instruction is a native page that evolves as you interact with it—the AI can edit it to reflect your preferences and notes. From a broader perspective, instructions are like specialized team members (Agents) you consult for specific tasks (writing reports, analyzing sales data, drafting marketing campaigns, etc.). Each "team member" has specific expertise and a personality that leverages your entire Notion workspace, connected apps, real-time web search, and the capabilities of underlying LLM models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The “Personalize” button next to Notion AI’s icon allows to set the AI instructions.
Extract Insights
An additional, powerful, much requested upgrade to Notion AI is that it can interact with Notion data sources. This means reading and writing capabilities of structured (data sources, previously known as databases) and unstructured (pages, composed of blocks) data in your workspace. So you can use Notion AI Agent to easily get insights about your data, without the need to write any code or add filters. You ask questions in natural language and Notion AI runs SQL queries as needed to extract the appropriate output.
For example, insights about sales data, project management, CRM, and anything else that you might track in Notion if you use it for your business. Or insights about your psychology, past and present behavioral patterns, tasks, etc. if you use it for your personal life.
The quality of the insights depends highly on the quality of the data — something that may sound obvious but worth remarking. Notion AI (and AI in general) doesn’t make up for crappy data. “Garbage in, garbage out” still applies as far as I can tell. Although one can argue that it applies to an increasingly lesser extent, because an AI that can directly access the primary source of your data doesn’t need a well-crafted database or well-working API integrations. Because the primary data sources are primary and true by definition.
When it comes to Notion AI, it can only access a few connected apps beyond your Notion workspace currently (see here), so the quality of the data in your workspace does matter.
Build Data Sources & Views
As mentioned, Notion AI is moving toward Agentic capabilities — not only chatting, but taking actions throughout the Notion workspace. This includes the ability to create data sources. A data source is what was formerly known as a "database," which now has a different meaning in Notion (find out more here).
We can instruct Notion AI to build something, and it does so. It can create databases, data sources, pages, add blocks, add demo data to data sources, and other actions we can take as users in Notion. For example, when I asked Notion AI Agent to "Build a demo CRM database," it built an accurate and well-designed database (see below) with multiple related Data Sources. All of this in about 1 minute, and the database is ready to go for further customizations and use.
This is quite incredible in my eyes, and it further contributes to the democratization of software that's been happening rapidly in recent times, significantly cutting down the time and effort required to build well-structured systems in Notion. Our focus can be further shifted into integrations, automations, and strategic thinking for the effective functioning and usage of the systems (for now).
We can also instruct Notion AI to create views of existing Data Sources (e.g., Charts, Tables, Galleries, etc.).
Asking Notion AI Agent to build a CRM database - end result shown in the picture, with multiple related Data Sources (Companies, Contacts, Deals, Activities)
Write Formulas
Notion AI can write formulas in Notion. On any Notion Formula property, we can instruct Notion AI in natural language to create the formula we need. Notion AI also leaves comments explaining each formula step. We can review and edit the formula manually or via Notion AI.
The Notion Formula editor with Notion AI Formula Writer
Custom AI Block
We can add a Custom AI Block on any page, as a sort of AI template with a pre-defined prompt that can be used on the page. For example, adding a custom AI block to a Data Source template so that every time we create a new page in that Data Source, the AI block with the pre-defined prompt is already there. We can then click the button to run the prompt and get the AI output appended to the page.
The AI block on a page. With custom instructions (prompt) and specific context (e.g., current page, and any other Notion page or Slack channel)
