Notion takes a quiet approach to designing AI features: ‘You can’t have every new tool screaming at you’

With software platforms racing to roll out AI features, Notion—the all-in-one productivity and workplace platform that gained a global cult following during the COVID pandemic—is betting that restraint will be a more successful design strategy. “You can’t have every new tool screaming at you,” Randy Hunt, Notion’s head of design, told Fortune on the sidelines of the Super AI summit in Singapore. He points to Notion’s AI summarization tool, revealed in a pop-up toolbar when users highlight a chunk of text, as an example of the app’s more understated approach. “There are other ways to drive awareness or adoption that aren’t about making all the features immediately present.” Notion first introduced AI features to its platform in 2023, powering basic actions like meeting transcription, translation, and summarization. Last September, it rolled out personal AI agents to complete routine tasks. It then released Custom Agents, which allows teams to set automated workflows without manual prompting, earlier this year. Despite these new capabilities, Notion has stayed true to its more simple design philosophy. Hunt describes this approach like “tending a garden,” where “you replant a number of things, bringing in new features, but it’s not a total redesign.” Notion’s new AI chat interface is the only area where the nature of the technology forced an interface change; other services are integrated into how Notion is already used. “We try to meet the user in the places they’re already doing things.” Ivan Zhao and Simon Last founded Notion in San Francisco in 2013. Despite $2 million in seed funding, the platform struggled to gain traction. In 2015, the founders laid off the entire team, took a $150,000 emergency loan from Zhao’s mother, and uprooted to lower-cost Japan. Relaunched as a malleable productivity tool in 2016, the app got its first million users by 2019. Customizable Notion templates flooded social media sites, with creators chalking up millions of views on You