---
title: "Notion"
description: "Productivity software company building collaborative work tools and AI-powered solutions for teams."
---

# Notion
> Productivity software company building collaborative work tools and AI-powered solutions for teams.

## Articles

### [The cure for "execution tax" | Notion](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-cure-for-execution-tax-notion.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Áine Dundas
- Published: Apr 9, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Brainlabs CEO Dan Gilbert describes “execution tax” as the gap between a decision and its outcome, where meeting action items are recorded, chased, or lost. He argues that AI has improved engineering productivity while leaving strategists, account managers, and operators with fragmented context and a wide gap between thinking and doing. Brainlabs chose Notion as a company-wide context layer and built “Get Stuff Done,” a factory of Notion Custom Agents that captures action items, assigns owners, and executes suitable work. Its automation uses Notion Custom Agents for native tasks, Notion Workers for external integrations, company-specific Skills and selected LLMs for complex tasks, and human-in-the-loop workflows when judgment remains necessary; Gilbert says some decisions now become completed work in minutes rather than weeks.


### [How Notion catches breaking schema changes before they reach production](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-notion-catches-breaking-schema-changes-before-they-reach-productio.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Maya Lekhi
- Published: Apr 2, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Schema drift in typed API requests and queue tasks can cause incidents when contracts change without detecting whether old payloads remain valid. Notion's CI guardrail extracts schema types from the base branch and compares them with PR types using TypeScript's compiler API, checking whether the old type is assignable to the new one. The check auto-discovers registered API endpoints and queue task types, uses git archive for base files, and currently covers approximately 1,300 endpoints and 296 task types. Backward compatibility blocks changes that reject old data, while queue schemas also receive an advisory forward check for rollout ordering. The rollout began with warnings, then made backward checks blocking and added a GitHub label for intentional exceptions; type checking still cannot catch extra runtime validation or semantic behavior changes.


### [Updating the design of Notion pages](https://yomu.fyi/post/updating-the-design-of-notion-pages.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Paul Velleux
- Published: Mar 18, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Notion revisited its page design after years of adding blocks with inconsistent spacing and related details. Rather than relying on baseline alignment, which is difficult across browsers and user-controlled block heights, the redesign uses standardized spacing to create rhythm while preserving flexibility. The team also changed paragraph spacing so readers can scan documents and see breaks more clearly, then addressed the resulting problem of lists feeling too loose or too tight. Its solution treats blocks above and below a block as adjacent and reduces padding when neighboring items belong to a list, including checklists, bulleted, toggle, numbered, and page lists. Notion says the system will roll out across all pages, including lists, headings, and mixed-content documents, over the coming weeks.


### [How Chronicle hit #1 on Product Hunt using Notion](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-chronicle-hit-1-on-product-hunt-using-notion.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Mayuresh Patole
- Published: Mar 5, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Chronicle’s Product Hunt launch aimed for a few hundred upvotes but reached number one and generated a waitlist of more than 100,000 signups. The remote team used Notion as a launch “mission control,” expanding an initial planning page into a database with status and due-date properties, assigned owners, collaborator tags, asset links, social copy, and calendar views. The shared hub coordinated feature timelines, asset publication, emails, LinkedIn posts, announcements, pre-launch instructions, and real-time launch-day updates without losing a single source of truth. Templates turned tasks into reusable pages containing creative files, drafts, and strategy notes, while the broader workspace also stored customer interview transcripts and marketing work. The team attributes the result to early preparation, careful copy and assets, coordinated support from its ecosystem, and treating the launch as a company-wide event; it says the process enabled speed, alignment across time zones, and documented repeatability.


### [How we built security into Custom Agents](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-built-security-into-custom-agents.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Sean Keenan, Jacob Brackett
- Published: Feb 27, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Custom Agents were designed for collaborative workspaces where useful access must be balanced against dangerous actions. They use a build-from-nothing model with no default read, write, or interaction permissions, then add resource-level controls such as page-level access, Slack “read and reply,” email confirmation, and selected MCP tools. Runtime safeguards combine permission controls with prompt-injection mitigations, monitoring of external data, warnings, owner confirmation for risky actions, and remediation such as deleting an incorrect Slack message. Alpha testing across Notion and customers produced more than 3,000 internal and 25,000 customer agents, and exposed overly broad Slack write access that could reach #general. That finding led to the custom permission and reinforced the case for first-party integrations, while planned work includes admin-approved broader scopes, Workers integrations, and additional permission modes.


### [How Notion uses Custom Agents](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-notion-uses-custom-agents.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Drew Evans
- Published: Feb 24, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Notion describes how Custom Agents are being used internally to automate repetitive questions, triage incoming work, and support communications, security, recruiting, and office operations. Agents are configured by describing a workflow and adding a trigger or schedule; they operate across Notion, Slack, Mail, Calendar, and other tools while using existing knowledge for context. Examples include a CX agent that searches the CX Knowledge Base and enablement docs, a Feedback Router that classifies Slack feedback and creates tasks, and Wilbur, which triages web issues and tags the right person. The company says these workflows make knowledge available beyond individual experts, reduce manual routing and response delays, and shift attention toward complex problems and creative work.


### [Introducing Custom Agents](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-custom-agents.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Akshay Kothari
- Published: Feb 24, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Notion has made Custom Agents available to Business and Enterprise plans as autonomous AI teammates for recurring work across Notion, Slack, Mail, Calendar, Figma, Linear, and custom MCP servers. Users describe a job and set triggers, while agents can answer questions, route tasks, compile updates, and run workflows across connected tools; setup includes an agent-written instruction set and tool configuration. The announcement describes enterprise controls including permissions, version control, usage analytics, logged runs, reversible changes, alerts, auto-pause, and administrative connection controls, while noting prompt-injection risks and planned guardrails. Custom Agents are free through 3 May 2026, then consume Notion credits based on work, with the seat price and other listed AI features unchanged; early testers have built over 21,000 agents.


### [Two years of vector search at Notion: 10x scale, 1/10th cost](https://yomu.fyi/post/two-years-of-vector-search-at-notion-10x-scale-1-10th-cost.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Preeti Gondi, Mickey Liu, Nathan Louie, Calder Lund, Jacob Sager
- Published: Feb 19, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Notion describes two years of scaling vector search for AI Q&A, where semantic embeddings retrieve workspace and connected-tool content by meaning rather than exact keywords. The initial system combined Apache Spark batch indexing with Kafka-driven real-time updates, workspace-based sharding, and generation routing; rapid demand drove a 600x increase in daily onboarding capacity and cleared a waitlist of millions of workspaces by April 2024. A serverless migration cut vector database costs 50 percent from peak usage, while a later move to turbopuffer reduced search-engine spend 60 percent, lowered AWS EMR costs 35 percent, and improved p50 query latency from 70–100ms to 50–70ms. Further work uses xxHash-based page-state caching in DynamoDB to reprocess only changed spans and shifts embeddings generation from Spark and query embeddings away from a third-party API to Ray on Anyscale, with early rollout results pointing to a projected 90+ percent reduction in embeddings infrastructure costs.


### [First Block with Gabe Pereyra, Co-founder and President of Harvey](https://yomu.fyi/post/first-block-with-gabe-pereyra-co-founder-and-president-of-harvey.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Anastasia Crew
- Published: Feb 18, 2026
- Type: Explainer

The episode presents Harvey’s founding and growth through Gabe Pereyra’s account of building an AI platform for large law firms and their clients. Two roommates—Winston, a securities litigator, and Gabe, an AI researcher—identified an opportunity in legal. Harvey chose a general-purpose platform over a narrow workflow such as NDA review, aiming for a comprehensive AI associate capable of handling varied work. The discussion also covers enterprise accuracy, infrastructure over models, and the difficulty of turning early seven-figure deals into a repeatable sales machine, with investors helping on that learning curve. Harvey’s trajectory includes a seed check from OpenAI and a valuation reported at $8 billion, while the episode frames domain expertise and scalable go-to-market execution as central founder lessons.


### [Everyone wants AI. That isn't enough.](https://yomu.fyi/post/everyone-wants-ai-that-isn-t-enough.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Makenna Lowe
- Published: Feb 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Survey data from more than 3,000 global knowledge workers and 85-plus interviews examines why strong demand for workplace AI has not translated into broad adoption. Although 93 percent call AI essential to modern productivity software and 80 percent are likely to switch to a platform offering it, only 20 percent say AI is deeply integrated into their company’s tools. Respondents prioritize recurring workflows such as automated project updates, continuously current knowledge hubs, and goal-based templates, while decision-makers identify integration as the leading implementation challenge alongside security and data quality, unclear strategy, resource constraints, and compatibility. The proposed pattern is to place AI inside existing work, illustrated by Faire’s reported results with Notion AI: smoother meetings for 81 percent of surveyed staff and workflows running 30 percent faster.


### [Balancing cost and reliability for Spark on Kubernetes](https://yomu.fyi/post/balancing-cost-and-reliability-for-spark-on-kubernetes.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Justin Lee
- Published: Feb 12, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Notion describes how it reduced Spark compute costs on Kubernetes while maintaining reliability across production workloads. After moving from fixed EC2 clusters on Amazon EMR to EMR on EKS, it used Karpenter, EKS Auto Mode, and the MostAllocated scheduler for dynamic provisioning and bin-packing. Spot Instances then exposed a failure mode: one interruption could remove many bin-packed executors, causing shuffle loss and expensive recomputation. Spot Balancer addresses this by labeling executor creation through a Kubernetes webhook and maintaining each job’s configured spot-to-on-demand ratio, with per-job counts stored in Redis. Named stability weights make the cost-reliability trade-off explicit, and reported savings reached 60–90 percent while jobs that previously failed from interruptions finished reliably.


### [How European companies build AI-ready knowledge foundations](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-european-companies-build-ai-ready-knowledge-foundations.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Laura Gregg
- Published: Feb 12, 2026
- Type: Explainer

European organisations face a knowledge paradox: 97% of surveyed business leaders say knowledge management is critical, but only 28% report having a coherent strategy, with poor practices costing up to €16,000 per employee annually. Interviews with leaders in France, Germany and the UK connect scattered information across people and tools to slower progress, weaker decision confidence, repetitive work and lost institutional knowledge. The post argues that centralised knowledge is a prerequisite for effective AI, noting that 56% of organisations already use AI for knowledge management and 29% are piloting it, while incomplete documentation can undermine deployments. Recommended practices include explaining the personal benefit of documentation, designing systems that pull participation rather than enforce compliance, and treating knowledge as a shared organisational asset. Examples include Nelly, Above, UnternehmerTUM and EGYM using simpler documentation workflows and shared spaces to reduce silos and keep information current.


### [GIC, Sequoia, Index purchase Notion shares in private tender offer](https://yomu.fyi/post/gic-sequoia-index-purchase-notion-shares-in-private-tender-offer.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Rama Katkar
- Published: Jan 26, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Notion held a private tender offer in which GIC, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures purchased about $270 million of shares directly from current and former employees at an $11 billion valuation. GIC is a new investor, while Sequoia and Index are returning investors; Notion says GIC’s long-term outlook and experience supporting growth in APAC and globally aligned with its future plans, including its Singapore office and regional presence in Tokyo, Seoul, and Sydney. The company says its growth accelerated in 2025 alongside AI adoption: more than 50% of ARR came from AI-enabled customers at the end of last year, and that percentage more than doubled over the last year. To broaden participation, Notion removed the one-year vesting cliff on options for current employees, providing financial liquidity to more Notinos and their families.


### [First Block with Gerry Giacomán Colyer, Co-founder and CEO of Clara](https://yomu.fyi/post/first-block-with-gerry-giacoma-n-colyer-co-founder-and-ceo-of-clara.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Anastasia Crew
- Published: Jan 21, 2026
- Type: Explainer

First Block features Gerry Giacomán Colyer, Clara’s co-founder and CEO, discussing the company’s founding, rapid growth, and expansion of AI agents for finance operations across Latin America. Clara’s bank partner shut down only months after launch, prompting the team to secure direct issuer licenses with Visa and MasterCard in two weeks and build more robust infrastructure from the outset. The episode connects that resilience to product-led growth: a self-serve onboarding flow supported more than 20,000 customers across three countries, from pre-revenue startups to the Mexican Stock Exchange. The company is now applying its transaction data across Latin American businesses to a financial analyst agent that automates policy enforcement and approval workflows. It also covers the founding lesson from a previous company’s financial-tooling difficulties, early milestones, scaling decisions, and a roadmap across markets, alongside questions about efficiency, resilient infrastructure, and distinctive data advantages.


### [Welcome to Notion, Sequin team!](https://yomu.fyi/post/welcome-to-notion-sequin-team.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Fuzzy Khosrowshahi
- Published: Jan 9, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Notion welcomes the Sequin team—Eric Goldman, Anthony Accomazzo, and Carter Pedersen—following discussions about the companies’ shared view of fragmented knowledge work. Sequin built a data-syncing product that brought information from systems including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Stripe into Postgres, giving developers flexible building blocks instead of requiring them to recreate integrations. The founders say they were drawn to Notion’s enterprise search, work on AI and agents, ambitious direction, and strong user community, while Notion describes Sequin’s experience as aligned with its plans. The announcement frames the broader problem as information scattered across documents, conversations, and tools, and points to AI and agents as a way to help teams find information, automate repetitive work, and prepare for AI-native work.


### [Why team size no longer matters](https://yomu.fyi/post/why-team-size-no-longer-matters.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Andrew McCarthy
- Published: Jan 7, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Lean teams competing with larger companies cannot match their rivals’ hiring capacity or budgets, prompting a reassessment of success based on individual impact rather than headcount. Adding tools, integrations, and AI can create a “multi-tool trap,” scattering information and accelerating mistakes when infrastructure and direction are weak. The recommended response is to consolidate work and knowledge into connected systems, invest in documentation such as roadmaps, specifications, requirements, and strategic memos, and choose infrastructure improvements over reflexive hiring. These foundations give AI usable context, preserve decisions through organizational change, and help individuals operate as effective generalists; the conclusion is that scalable infrastructure can let one person do work that once required three, while making each future hire more impactful.


### [How Merge brought together all it knows using Notion AI](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-merge-brought-together-all-it-knows-using-notion-ai.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Shensi Ding
- Published: Dec 23, 2025
- Type: Problem & solution

Merge found that company knowledge was scattered across Slack, Google Docs, Salesforce, and other tools, causing repeated questions, slow onboarding, and time lost searching for context. It used Notion AI as a shared knowledge layer, connected Salesforce and Slack, and gave teams guidance on what content to add, including detailed project documents, meeting transcripts, and structured databases. Teams populated the workspace with content calendars, sales enablement materials, hiring plans, roadmaps, and an AI Prompt Library, while all-hands and team meetings demonstrated practical workflows. Merge reports that employees now ask Notion AI first, saving each team member several hours per week, helping teams make decisions with less manual searching, and making faster information retrieval one of the most-cited contributors to improved satisfaction in its latest company-wide survey.


### [Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds](https://yomu.fyi/post/steam-steel-and-infinite-minds.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Ivan Zhao
- Published: Dec 22, 2025
- Type: Explainer

The post frames AI as a new “miracle material” that could reshape knowledge work as steel and semiconductors reshaped earlier eras. It argues that coding agents already let one programmer orchestrate several AI coding agents, but broader knowledge work remains constrained by fragmented context across tools and weak verifiability. At the organisational level, it compares AI with steel and steam, suggesting agents could preserve workflow context, surface decisions, and reduce dependence on meetings and hierarchical approvals; Notion is described as using more than 700 agents alongside 1,000 employees for repetitive tasks. At economy scale, it predicts organisations spanning humans and thousands of agents, with continuous workflows and new rhythms, while acknowledging that this transition may be disorienting and requires redesign rather than simply adding chatbots to existing tools.


### [First Block – Tools & craft – Notion](https://yomu.fyi/post/first-block-tools-craft-notion.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Published: Dec 22, 2025
- Type: Announcement

First Block is a set of conversations with founders and company leaders across legal technology, finance, career access, software development, talent, go-to-market, and developer tools. The episodes feature Gabe Pereyra of Harvey, Gerry Giacomán Colyer of Clara, Garrett Lord of Handshake, Jesse Zhang of Decagon, Fabian Hedin of Lovable, Brendan Foody of Mercor, Varun Anand of Clay, and Michael Truell of Cursor. Topics include deploying AI agents in finance operations across Latin America, democratizing software development and career opportunities, intentional customer discovery, and building for current AI capabilities. The collection also covers founder-led selling, product-market fit, specialized go-to-market platforms, commercial thinking, startup pivots, and departures from conventional startup advice.


### [Make with Notion Showcase Europe 2025: Highlights & Takeaways](https://yomu.fyi/post/make-with-notion-showcase-europe-2025-highlights-takeaways.md)
- Company: [Notion](https://yomu.fyi/company/notion.md)
- Author: Áine Dundas
- Published: Dec 18, 2025
- Type: Announcement

Make with Notion Showcase Europe 2025 brought more than 1,300 attendees across four cities during the second year of the in-person conference series. The event centered on three themes: agentic AI taking action, organized knowledge enabling effective AI, and a community building AI-powered work. Notion presented Notion 3.0, whose Agent can handle multi-step workflows, and previewed Custom Agents that can be shared across teams, scoped to databases or teamspaces, and triggered by schedules or events. With MCP integration, Notion content and connected app context can be accessed from other tools; Custom Agents are in early access and planned for broader availability in early 2026. Research cited losses of up to €16,000 per employee annually in the UK, France, and Germany from searching for scattered information, while customer sessions covered knowledge management, AI workflows, and Notion implementations.


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