Notion, a collaboration platform, is unveiling custom agents that answer repetitive questions within organisations, classify tickets and automatically generate status reports.

Notion has been testing custom agents in cooperation with Ramp, Vercel, Clay and Cursor.

Notion CEO Ivan Zhao (이반 자오) stressed on the Access podcast hosted by Alex Heath (알렉스 헤스) that custom agents are the company’s biggest change since its launch.

According to him, one agent run at Ramp handled 4,000 questions in just a few weeks, saving about 2,000 hours. More than half of Notion databases are already being built by agents rather than people. Zhao also manages his email inbox through an AI chat interface.

Notion is also testing a model that charges based on agent usage instead of the per-user pricing used by many SaaS products. Zhao’s view is that this can open a market 10 times larger than the existing SaaS market. “No software company has succeeded in making this kind of transition at scale yet,” he said, adding, “I will solve this problem before an IPO.”

Zhao also highlighted that the era of software companies building products only for people is over. “If it is a product an agent cannot use, the future is not bright,” he said. “Companies that lock the door on APIs and endpoints are making the wrong choice, and Notion is going in the opposite direction.” He said Notion is bringing external agents such as Claude and Cursor into Notion workspaces and taking a neutral position toward model providers. He again stressed that companies with structures that are hard for agents to navigate, such as button-centric interfaces, will lose market share as AI handles more knowledge work.

Notion is also preparing a standalone AI chat app. The chat app is a chat-only interface with full context of the Notion platform and can manage email and calendars. He said a small team quickly built the chat app using a coding agent.

Notion is also changing how it hires. Notion hired a 16-year-old programmer after discovering a high school student who posted design and AI videos on YouTube and inviting the student to the office, only to learn the student was in 10th grade. The student is now developing much of a new product that Notion will announce in May, Zhao said.

Zhao also highlighted that he is deliberately increasing hiring of early-career candidates. Younger talent adopts AI tools quickly and has no preconceptions about technical limits, he said. “A lot of experience is not important anymore. You just need to be able to ask the right questions,” he said.