Make with Notion 2025

Last week in San Francisco at Make With Notion, the company's annual product showcase, Notion announced an exciting set of new AI capabilities as part of what they're calling Notion 3.0, along with some other long-awaited features and enhancements to how they manage their growing community of creators and partners.

You can read about everything they announced on their blog, but here’s a rundown of what I’m personally most excited about.

It’s the next step in the evolution of the already-great Notion AI from a helpful chatbot into Agents that can act like full-fledged AI teammates. They can follow multi-step instructions and work autonomously for up to 20 minutes, pulling context from connected tools like Slack, Google Workspace, Linear, GitHub, and Jira. Beyond drafting content, they now build complex documents and databases because they “understand” Notion’s architecture.

Agents can also now be tailored with personalities and memory you can define. This is similar to creating Custom GPTs in ChatGPT, but in typical Notion fashion, it’s super simple to use. You can link your Agent to any page in your workspace to define the Agent’s role, writing style, or key context. Updating it just means editing the page.

The keynote also teased quick toggling between personalities, which I can imagine using to switch behaviour between different tasks like drafting social content drafting, responding to customer support inquiries, or debugging code.

One of the most practical upgrades: Notion AI can now send emails and schedule meetings, always with a confirmation prompt. Imagine: Notion AI transcribes a client call, drafts a follow-up, sends it, and books the next meeting - all without me switching to another app.

Notion is also coming for the automation use case. Soon, we’ll be able create Custom Agents that can work on their own for up to 20 minutes at a time, and that that can be triggered by events in connected tools like Slack or Gmail, or run automatically on a fixed schedule.

One demo was a Custom Agent that monitors Slack and replies to FAQs based on knowledge stored in Notion and other connected tools. I’ve wanted something like this for years, and I can imagine it being really useful for companies like Linear and Granola, which use Slack to manage large user communities.

While Notion will never match the 8,000+ third-party app integrations that a dedicated automation platform like Zapier offers, I can certainly imagine these Custom Agents becoming a viable substitute for Zapier Agents for simpler, targeted use cases.

I get it: “granular database permissions” sounds like uber-nerd stuff that no normal person should care about. But it’s something I’ve been wanting literally for years, and here’s why:

Until now, if you wanted to share database access with someone — be it a teammate, external consultant, contractor, or client — you had to grant access to the entire database. This rarely aligned with actual needs. You might want contractors to only access tasks assigned to them in your Tasks database, or colleagues in a large organisation to only view meeting notes where they were actual participants. But no straightforward solution existed. For years, Notion power users have been sharing elaborate, unhinged, and occasionally angry workarounds on Reddit involving duplicate and master databases. (There's even a meta thread-of-threads about it!)

At long last, our international nightmare is over. As long as your database has at least one Person property, you can now assign specific permissions to the people (or user groups) tagged in that property.

For instance:

And importantly, Notion AI will always respect the permissions of the person making the request, so your AI Agent can’t view or edit pages that you aren’t supposed to have access to.

Notion invests deeply in its community of enthusiasts, creators, and partners, and had some exciting announcements in this arena as well.

First, creators will be able to share and sell custom Agent personalities in the same Marketplace where you can already find over 30,000 templates to manage anything you want to do in Notion, whether it’s for work, school, fitness, or life in general.

In case it wasn’t already obvious, I’m super excited about all the new features and updates that were introduced at Make With Notion. For founders and operators in Asia, this is a great time to cut down on app sprawl and automate the boring stuff so teams can focus on growth.

If you’d like to explore how Notion 3.0 can streamline your own workflows, let’s talk:

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