Productivity software maker Notion is stepping into the agent era.
In a livestreamed product announcement Wednesday, the company best known for its collaborative note-taking app expanded the capabilities of its custom AI agents, connected them with external agents, and introduced a new developer platform that lets teams build automated, multi-step workflows that can ingest data from any database.
By building an orchestration layer (a system that coordinates AI work across multiple tools and data sources), Notion positions itself not only as an AI-powered note-taker, but also as a hub where users and agents can collaborate across tools and databases.
In February, Notion first released Custom Agents, AI teammates that handle repetitive tasks like answering frequently asked questions, compiling status updates, and automating workflows. Since then, Notion customers have built more than 1 million agents, the company says.
However, these agents had limitations. It was not possible to connect to external data or use custom logic. External agents used by companies also had no way to connect to Notion workspaces. Teams have had to work around these issues by using third-party automation platforms or writing their own scripts that run on their own infrastructure.
“It’s true that historically, Notion hasn’t been the most developer-focused platform,” Notion co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao said during the livestream. “But things are changing.”
In the future, Notion will allow teams to deploy their own custom code. The new Workers, Notion’s cloud-based environment for running custom code, allows customers to write logic and deploy it in a secure sandbox, an isolated environment that prevents code from interfering with other systems. This allows teams to sync data to Notion, build custom tools, trigger work with webhooks, and more without relying on external infrastructure. A webhook is an automatic signal that initiates an action when something happens in another app.
You don’t even have to write any code. The company points out that any AI coding agent of your choice can do it.
Workers uses the same credit system as Custom Agent, but Notion is making it free until August to allow developers to experiment.
Syncing external data sources is also part of the Notion developer platform. The database synchronization feature using Workers can import data from any database using the API. This means you can access and keep your data up to date in your own Notion databases, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Postgres.
Zhao said this means Notion users can “use the Notion database as a pure canvas for powering both workflows and agents.”
Employees can also build agent tools with custom logic in case connecting with third parties via MCP (short for Model Context Protocol, an emerging standard that allows AI tools to connect to external data and services) isn’t enough.
Another addition allows Notion users to directly chat, assign work, and track progress with the external AI agents they use, as if they were Notion’s own custom agents. At launch, Notion says Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Decagon are supported partner agents, but it plans to add more.
There’s also an external agent API if your team wants to connect to Notion, such as an internal agent built specifically for their needs.
Developers and agents interact with Notion’s new developer platform through the Notion CLI, a command-line tool for developers available on the company’s Business and Enterprise plans.
The developer platform represents a change in Notion’s strategy, making it a programmable platform rather than just an application, and set to compete with other workflow automation platforms. As companies become increasingly interested in automating knowledge work and building internal AI systems, platforms that connect agents, custom code, and live data in one place are starting to look more like core infrastructure than productivity apps.
This also follows a broader trend among AI companies to go beyond AI chatbots and offer agent tools that can perform actions across different software platforms.
“All the data, all the tools, all the agents, that’s what the Notion developer platform is all about,” Zhao said.
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