Notion's next act
CEO Ivan Zhao on the company's big custom agents launch, changing its business model for AI, hiring a 16-year-old engineer, and more.
“If your product cannot be used by agents, I don’t think the future is very promising for you.”
Notion CEO Ivan Zhao is preparing to ship the company’s most consequential product update in years. Next week, Notion publicly launches custom agents that can answer repetitive questions, triage tickets, and more across organizations. Notion has been testing the product with companies like Ramp, Vercel, Clay, and Cursor. Zhao shared that one customer agent at Ramp alone answered 4,000 questions in a couple of weeks, saving an estimated 2,000 hours. He also revealed that more than 50% of Notion databases are now built by agents rather than humans, and that he personally manages his email inbox almost entirely through an AI chat interface.
Zhao is also rethinking how Notion’s business operates due to AI. The company is actively experimenting with usage-based pricing for custom agents, as Zhao bets that selling work and outcomes rather than seats will unlock a market roughly 10x the size of traditional SaaS tooling. No software company has successfully made this transition at scale yet, and Zhao wants Notion to figure it out while still private. He also dropped that Notion is building a standalone AI chat app and plans to release a wave of developer-facing features in the coming months — a significant shift for a platform that historically hasn’t been developer-centric.
Catch the full conversation on this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger:
Zhao co-founded Notion over a decade ago and has rebuilt the product multiple times. He’s become one of the more thoughtful voices on how AI reshapes not just features but business models and org structures. He recently coined the phrase “manager of infinite minds,” which Satya Nadella fondly referred to alongside iconic quotes from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at Davos.
Highlights from the interview:
“If your product cannot be used by agents, I don’t think the future is very promising for you.” Zhao argued that software companies are no longer just building for humans but for other language models and agents. He said companies that close down their APIs and endpoints are making the wrong bet, and that Notion is going the opposite direction: opening up to developers, welcoming external agents like Claude and Cursor into Notion workspaces, and positioning itself as “Switzerland” across model providers. He predicted companies with rigid, button-heavy interfaces that agents can’t navigate will lose market share as AI handles more knowledge work.
Custom Notion agents launch publicly next week. The product targets three core use cases: answering repetitive questions from knowledge bases, triaging tickets and to-dos across teams, and generating status updates automatically. Zhao also previewed a standalone AI chat app that Notion plans to release. It’s a dedicated, chat-first interface with full Notion context that can manage email and calendars. He said a small team was able to build it quickly using coding agents.
Notion hired a 16-year-old programmer and is deliberately skewing younger across the company. Zhao said the hire came after the team found a talented high schooler making design and AI videos on YouTube, invited him to the office, and discovered he was still in 10th grade. The kid is now building a significant chunk of a new product that Notion plans to announce in May. Zhao said the company is broadly shifting toward early-career hires because younger people embrace AI tools faster and carry fewer assumptions about what the technology can't do. "A lot of experience doesn't matter anymore," he said. "You just have to ask the right questions."
Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.
Catch me on yesterday’s Prof G Markets
Thanks as always to Ed Elson for having me on.
Elsewhere
Not even Narendra could get Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to hold hands. The most viral moment from this week’s big India AI Impact Summit is Altman and Amodei awkwardly refusing to hold hands for the big photo with all the tech leaders onstage.
Wired’s ‘‘gay tech mafia” cover story has the internet up in arms. Is all press actually good press? Wired is finding out with its new cover story, which had caused quite a heated reaction from its ex-editor-in-chief to my friend Casey Newton, who said he declined to participate and “felt sadly vindicated today when the framing was ‘in Silicon Valley the GAYS are shaking hands with their DICKS.’”
Jim Prosser’s reaction to my interview with Figma CEO Dylan Field: “Benioff doesn’t have a thesis for his future. McDermott doesn’t have one. Karp has a thesis, but it’s about everybody else dying, which isn’t the same thing. Field has one. And for the moment, the market is listening.”
ICYMI
Sources is a newsletter by Alex Heath about the AI race, featuring scoops, unique analysis, and exclusive interviews. Every week, Sources is read by thousands of decision makers in tech, finance, policy, and media. Click here to learn more.