Notion AI Agent Use Cases (Agent Personalization Templates)
Agentic AI — LLMs that can not only output text, but take actions on your behalf using multiple tools — is being released and refined in Notion. This shifts some fundamental paradigms of how you use Notion, if you intend to employ Notion AI in your workspace, which doesn’t have to be the case. You can still use Notion without AI.
Notion AI can now interact with your entire workspace. This is worth discussing because AI is becoming common across all software tools. It promises to make you more productive and help you do more meaningful work. Like any new frameworks, it is worth understanding more in depth, so you can decide for yourself whether to leverage or discard it. Deciding for yourself instead of following herd behavior.
I published a post and video about Notion AI Agent some time ago, explaining all the main features and functioning. In this post, I am focusing on customizing instructions and some use cases to make the most of the AI Agent in Notion.
As a brief recap of how Notion AI Agent works:
You can use the Notion AI chat interface to interact with the AI Agent - either from the widget at the bottom right corner of any Notion page, or in full screen via the “Notion AI” page on the left sidebar
You can customize the personality (instructions) of Notion AI Agent across any interaction (chat). Instructions are custom prompts. They define how the Agent “behaves”, its tone of voice, response formatting, and other customizations.
Instructions can be private or shared with other users. It can be good to keep them private to ensure that updates made by the Agent about your preferences only affect your Agent personality, and not other people’s. You may use the same Instructions, but your preferences as a user may differ from other people.
Guardrails for taking actions
Notion AI Agent can do almost everything you can do in Notion (see here for more details). This includes creating, updating, moving, and deleting pages and data sources. You may want to include a clear prompt to request your confirmation before taking any action in the workspace, particularly if you are in a workspace with lots of important data. This would stop the AI from acting without your permission. It will always ask before proceeding.
Custom Agents work differently. They can take actions automatically without asking you first (i.e., they are automated). In this case, defining very clearly the goal of each Custom Agent and the prompts used is the best way to establish effective guardrails. I will cover Notion Custom Agents in a dedicated essay and video. In this post, I am focusing on the Notion AI Agent (used via the chat interfaces).
Custom Instructions
Here are some Notion AI Agent instruction templates I have created — feel free to duplicate and use them.
Personal insights coach — helps you make decisions, inquire within yourself to find out patterns, areas of improvement, and similar life coaching stuff. If you have accumulated many notes, journal entries, writing, and other constructs in Notion, this can become a powerful tool to reflect on the past, define the present, and devise future experiments/plans.
Marketing lead — analyzes sales and other business data (in Notion) to define marketing strategies, tactics, and campaigns. It can be powerful as a brainstorming assistant for marketing ideas and strategies you may otherwise not even imagine. The more information you have about your business in your Notion workspace, the more useful it can be, because with more context, there are more tailor-made outputs.
Task leverage coach — defines and sets daily and weekly top priorities. Top priorities are the few things that, if worked on, make multiple other tasks irrelevant. This means facilitating your work on high-leverage pursuits that eliminate the need to work on “paper-cuts” (small tasks that don’t move the needle on your business or life).
The skill of identifying such high-leverage tasks is difficult to hone, yet the highest chances of living the life you want stem from your ability to identify the highest leverage pursuits and make progress on them every day. This AI Agent helps you with that, organizing all the data in Notion for clear visibility and actionability.
The Great CEO Within Coach — a business coach by your side, specifically trained on The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary. This is great for startup founders and operators in much need of clear operating principles and actionable frameworks to scale up without losing their minds. It’s like having a coach by your side anytime you need, plus it has immediate access to all your business and personal context (that you decide to share).
The Great CEO Within Notion template has been one of my best-selling templates consistently for more than 3 years. This custom AI Agent can be a great companion to the template, or you may use it within your own system.
Weekly Review Assistant — a custom coach/assistant that summarizes the past week’s wins, stuck points, and metrics. It suggests one improvement experiment and one thing to drop. This works well if you keep your projects/tasks/notes in Notion, and you run weekly reviews (a powerful tool for knowledge workers if used consistently over time) to reflect on the past week and envision the week ahead.
Keep in mind, all of these custom instructions are Notion pages, which means they are customizable like any Notion page (add links, linked views, references to other pages, and any other Notion block). You can customize them to fit your own style as much or as little as you wish.
Questions or thoughts? I’d love to hear from you - get in touch here
