AI Skills in Notion Just Got a Lot More Useful

In my earlier post on AI skills, I wrote about using them to give your LLM a more useful understanding of how I work, with examples from both Claude and Notion.

At the time, Notion’s implementation of skills was pretty rudimentary compared to Claude’s. A Claude skill could bundle reference files, scripts, templates, and assets together with its instructions. A Notion AI skill was a single page of text. Claude loaded skills automatically based on context; in Notion, you had to explicitly @-mention them, or resort to hacky workarounds to get Notion AI to load them automatically. And unlike Claude, Notion didn’t have a built-in way to deploy skills across an entire team.

Three recent updates to Notion's skills feature have closed most of the gap with Claude. Let’s dive in.

The biggest change is that AI skills in Notion can now include file attachments, stored in the Files property of a skills database page. Notion Agent has its own secure computer where it can upload, unzip, and work with files you attach to a skill, the same computer it uses when you ask it to analyse a spreadsheet or build a slide deck.

This now works much like a Claude skill, which can bundle reference documents, scripts, and assets alongside its main SKILL.md file. A brand-design skill can include approved logos, typefaces, colour rules, and slide templates. A proposal-writing skill can include a statement-of-work template, commercial guidance, and approved case studies.

Before this change, it would have been impossible to replicate the design skill we built for Claude, shown below, in Notion. It’s got a ton of assets and reference files that weren’t possible to incorporate into a Notion skill.

Brand design is one of the clearest applications because the source material is tangible. A well-crafted brand-design skill gives the AI the files it needs alongside the instructions for using them, rather than asking it to approximate a brand from a paragraph of adjectives. The Files property in a skills database gives those materials a sensible home, rather than leaving someone to hunt for a link to the right folder. If you have multiple files you want to bundle into a skill, you can attach them as a single zip archive, which Notion Agent can unzip in its secure computer, enabling it to not only access the files themselves but also understand the directory structure in which they’re organised.

Not all skills need a bundled set of files like this; many are still fine as a single text page. But the fact that Notion supports this now means that you can build much more capable skills than before.

Notion has also caught up on how you trigger skills, most importantly by removing the need to consciously trigger them at all.

As with Claude, Notion Agent can now use your skills automatically. When you describe a task in chat, it reads the Description property of your skill pages and decides whether one is a good match. You can enable automatic use for any skill from the top of the page when viewing it, or from the Skills tab of your Library.

To trigger a skill manually, typing / in a Notion AI chat followed by a skill name brings up a filtered list of just your skill pages. This is noticeably faster than typing @ and filtering through every page in your workspace, which was the previous method. You can also run skills from the text selection menu, the block menu, or the slash menu next to content.

These changes solve the biggest pain point with Notion’s original implementation of skills. Having to know which skills were available and then remember to trigger them introduced a lot of friction, and made it especially difficult to deploy skills across an entire team.

The third update matters most for teams. Workspace owners can now designate certain skills as Defaults, which are installed for every user in the workspace automatically.

Organisations on Claude's Team or Enterprise plans had this capability for some time, but in Notion, deploying skills to others meant having to walk each person through a settings configuration and then remind them to manually trigger the skills when relevant. It wasn’t really practical across large, or arguably even small teams.

My only nit with this new feature is that workspace owners have to dig through a separate section in Settings to find it; I’d much rather they be able to set skills as defaults right from the Skills tab in the Library, so everything was in one place and more discoverable. I’ve given my feedback to the Notion team, so hopefully this gets simplified in a future update.

The use cases for org-wide default skills are straightforward. AI’s dynamism and creativity are its most compelling features, but there are certain types of work where consistency matters, such as generating brand-compliant presentations and marketing assets or drafting proposals that follow a consistent structure.

When a process affects client work, sales materials, or sensitive data, a default skill gives the entire team one current version of that process, and makes improvement easier. As you refine the skill over time, the whole team benefits.

The gap that made Notion skills feel like underpowered is now basically closed. For anyone who has been waiting for Notion to catch up before investing time in building skills, this is a reasonable moment to start.

Start with a task that comes up often and where you already know what a good answer looks like. Gather the files and examples you rely on, write a precise description, and test it against real work. A few well-built skills will do more than a large library of half-finished ones.

Not sure how to get started building your own skill? We have a skill for that! Here’s a template for the skill we use to build and edit our other skills. Just install and enable it, then ask Notion Agent to help you write a new skill.

Teams building their operating system in Notion can start a free Notion trial through our partner link. (Referral link; we earn a small commission if you sign up.)

For help turning the way your team already works into useful AI skills, book a discovery call or drop us a message.