The productivity tool betting on humans over AI
What an evening with Notion revealed about its contrarian pitch.
Planning your next podcast? Scripting a viral clip? Or perhaps you want an AI agent to triage hundreds of emails? The Notion app can do all of this, and more.
I dropped by the Notion media mixer this evening, and the sharing by Hanafi Mohd Sam and Nasri Nasir opened my eyes to just how much AI is now baked into the popular productivity tool.
Humans are key
It's not often I see a tech firm celebrate human collaboration over AI. But that's exactly what the Notion team did today, opening with a video clip.
I'll leave you to watch it and decide for yourself, but the gist is that Notion is running in the opposite direction of everyone else. Their message: AI is great, but humans are key. I find that refreshing.
And in case you were wondering, I don't currently use Notion. I'm a believer in not closing doors, though, and I definitely saw capabilities I want to explore.
Photo Caption: Photo on the right - (Left to right) Vanessa Intan. Caroline Huynh.
From podcast to viral clip
Hanafi started by sharing how he used Notion to plan and script his Golden Nuggets Podcast, which has run weekly for hundreds of episodes since 2023. I'm only on newsletter issue 99 myself, so I honestly don't know how he pulls it off.
He also shared the secret sauce behind how he consistently churns out viral video clips. I'll drop you a nugget here: it involves Notion, AI, and closely studying what has worked for others. Finally, Nasri talked about building a custom AI agent to help journalists and aspiring content creators quickly triage, write, and socialise their content.
Photo Caption: (Middle) Hanafi Mohd Sam. (Right) Nasri Nasir.
The developer angle
What caught my eye was the Notion Developer Platform, with the latest release, 3.5, announced in mid-May. From a bit of research on the way home, I came across some interesting features. It can orchestrate everyone's agents, sync from any data source, build custom tools for your agents, and trigger workflows from anywhere.
The most interesting is "Workers," which looks partly modelled after Cloudflare's Workers and Pages, which I've used to host a couple of projects recently. In essence, Notion Workers let you extend Notion, connecting to other APIs and anchoring automation code without running your own servers. I'm going to check it out.
