Everyone calls their AI product an “agent” but Notion’s actually live up to the hype. It took Akshay (Notion’s co-founder) and Ryan (AI lead) 2 years of failure to build agents that can create databases, respond to Slack, and more. We had a great chat about their most surprising lessons from building the best AI agents for work.

We talked about:

(00:00) What it really took to build agents that actually work
(01:38) Live demo: Watch a database build itself in real-time
(04:56) How Akshay writes docs by just talking to AI 90% of the time
(20:15) The real difference between AI slop and useful AI agents
(34:43) Personalizing agents with custom memory and instructions
(39:59) Live demo: Building a custom Notion agent for Slack
(49:03) What Notion looks for when hiring AI-native builders

Get the takeaways: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/how-notion-built-the-best-ai-agents-for-work-akshay-ryanWhere to find:

Akshay: https://x.com/akothari

Ryan: https://x.com/_ryannystrom

Notion AI agents: https://www.notion.com/blog/introducing-notion-3-0

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