Productivity software maker Understanding enters the age of agency.
Live streaming product announcement The company, best known for its collaborative note-taking software, on Wednesday unveiled a new developer platform that extends the capabilities of custom AI agents, communicates with external agents and allows teams to create automated multi-step workflows that can pull data from any database.
By creating an orchestration layer, a system that coordinates AI work across multiple tools and data sources, Notion positions itself as a hub where people and agents can collaborate across tools and databases, rather than a record-taker with AI features.
In February, Notion held its first presentation Special Agents — AI teammates who perform repetitive tasks like answering FAQs, composing status updates, and automating workflows. Since then, Notion customers have installed more than one million agents, the company says.
However, these agents had limitations. They could not communicate with external data or use custom logic. The external agents used by the companies also had no way to connect to the Notion workspace. Teams had to solve these problems by using third-party automation platforms or by writing their own scripts that ran on their own infrastructure.
“It’s true that historically, Notion has not been the most developer-focused platform,” Notion co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao said during the live stream. “But things change.”
Notion will now allow teams to deploy their own custom code. With the new Workers, Notion’s cloud-based environment for running custom code, customers can write their own logic and place it in a secure sandbox (an isolated environment that prevents code from interfering with other systems). This allows teams to do things like sync their data with Notion, build custom tools, and work with webhooks—automated alerts that trigger actions when something happens in another application—without relying on external infrastructure.
You don’t even need to write the code. The company emphasizes that the AI coding agent of your choice can do this for you.
Workers will use the same credit system as Special Agents, but Notion is making it free until August so developers can experiment.
Synchronization of external data sources is also part of the Notion Developer Platform. Database synchronization feature supported by workers can retrieve data from any database with API. This means you can access data from places like Salesforce, Zendesk, Postgres and others in your Notion databases and keep the data current.
This means Notion users can now “use your Notion database as a transparent canvas to power both your workflows and your agents,” Zhao noted.
Employees can also create agent tools with custom logic when communicating with a third party 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 chat directly with the external AI agents they use, assign them tasks, and track their progress as if they were one of Notion’s own custom agents. Initially, Notion says Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Decagon are supported partner agents, but plans to add more.
There’s also an External Agent API if teams want to connect their own internal agents to Notion, as they’ve built specifically for their company’s needs.
Developers and agents connect with Notion’s new Developer Platform Understanding CLIa command-line tool for developers available in the company’s Business and Enterprise Plans.
The Developer Platform represents a shift in strategy for Notion as it becomes more of a programmable platform than just an application, positioning it to compete with other workflow automation platforms. As enterprises automate knowledge work and build internal AI systems, a platform that brings together agents, custom code, and live data is starting to look less like productivity software and more like basic infrastructure.
It also follows a broader trend among AI companies moving beyond the AI chatbot to offer agent tools that can move across different software platforms.
“Any data, any tool, any agent — that’s the big picture for the Notion Developer Platform,” Zhao said.
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