I went hands-on with Notion’s Custom Agents without seeing a use case — now I’m convinced they’re the future

Notion on phone — (Image credit: Shutterstock)

If you’re not one of the millions of people using Notion, you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. The company’s ‘no-code’ style of database management, flexible page designs, and growing creator economy have made it one of the most-talked-about apps right now - but it’s getting increasingly tough to explain what it is.

While Elon Musk once tried to explain how ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) would one day become the everything app, Notion has essentially cracked just that. Some use it for fitness plans, others for meeting notes, and others for complex databases, while its standalone Mail and Calendar apps are almost as malleable.

This context is important because Notion keeps adding to its AI features within the app, and it’s introducing a new feature on top of its Agents dubbed Custom Agents. Ahead of launch, I went hands-on and came away impressed.

Agent, activate

Notion Custom Agents — (Image credit: Notion)

Agentic AI is a way to get your AI assistant to manage a workload or tasks without you needing to prompt it to do so, and it’s nothing particularly new. It falls somewhere between LLM management and the automation of old, working on triggers to provide responses and take actions.

Notion is, as of today, offering Custom Agents that can pull from multiple data sources and triggers, but run in the background regularly.

One example Notion showed me was using a specific Slack channel to use as a Custom Agent trigger. When a message asking about the status of a project arrives, the Custom Agent scours the Slack conversations listed, prods the Notion database for the information it needs, and responds.

For the user asking the question, there’s a delay of seconds, and no further input is required outside of the initial setup.

If you’re a developer, you can have your Custom Agent assign an engineer to every bug report, add it to a weekly report, and have its progress searchable with the kind of setup that’s as intuitive as you’d expect from Notion.

Each Agent can be customized both visually and by name, but you can also specify the kinds of responses you want it to have (detailed versus casual, for example), and with Notion’s flexibility, it’s easy to set just about anything as a trigger.

Oh, and if you’re worried everyone in your team might accidentally create their own Custom Agent and bring processes to a grinding halt, fear not: Notion says you can select who has access to Custom Agents, who can create and edit them, and which pages the agents can see.

Notion is just the start

Naturally, the big draw for agentic AI in Notion is that it’s an app (as I noted earlier) that doesn’t really have any walls. You can log your company’s policies in there and have your Custom Agents read through them before responding to supplier queries, or have your Notion Mail hooked up so that an email flagged with a certain tag gets dropped straight into a workflow.

It’s the kind of automation I feel the app’s already fervent community will do absolutely bonkers things with, but in many ways it’s not just for Notion and its Mail and Calendar apps.

Notion already lets you switch freely between chatbots from Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT, but Custom Agents will also hook into Notion’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). That gives it access to the likes of Figma, HubSpot, Stripe, GitHub, and more, with particular attention being given in our behind-the-scenes demo for Slack.

Not only can a message trigger a Custom Agent workflow, but you can even use an emoji to kick off a process. It’s worth noting that these features are in beta for now, with only public Slack channels supported, but support for private ones is on the roadmap.

The price of the process

That leaves just one big question, though: What does all of this cost? As a reminder, Notion has a free plan with an AI trial, but you need to buy the business or enterprise plan to gain full access.

Rather than including Custom Agents with any specific plans, though, Notion is running a credit-based payment system. Users on business and enterprise plans will have access from today as part of a two-month trial period to plan Custom Agents and how best to utilize them. After that, they’ll need to buy credits for each use, with Notion telling me they advise customers to create their most important Custom Agents first, and then work their way down their task list while managing available credits in the new Credits dashboard view.

Credits won’t roll over each month, but the two-month trial should help identify how many (or how few) a business will need.

I see the future

I’ve been a little down on Agentic AI because my workflows aren’t really in need of an extra, artificial pair of hands. As a freelance writer, I write, I invoice, and none of that is handled with AI.

For larger teams, however, I can certainly see the appeal. A reporting agent that can pull relevant data for a weekly team meeting is the kind of thing that could have saved me hours of my life in a prior role, and I think once the Notion community goes hands-on with Custom Agents, we’ll see some wild things that the Notion team itself hadn’t considered.

You can test Notion Custom Agents right now, included with Business and Enterprise plans until May 4. After May 4, you’ll need to buy Notion credits.

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