Productivity software maker Notion is entering the agent era.
In a live broadcast product advertisement On Wednesday, the company, best known for its collaborative note-taking app, unveiled a new development platform that extends the capabilities of its custom AI agents, connects with external agents and allows teams to create multi-step automated workflows that can extract data from any database.
By creating an orchestration layer (a system that coordinates AI work across multiple tools and data sources), Notion is positioning itself as more than just a note-taker with AI capabilities and instead as a hub where people and agents can collaborate across tools and databases.
In February, Notion first launched its Custom agents — AI teammates that handle repetitive tasks, such as answering FAQs, compiling status updates, and automating workflows. Since then, Notion customers have created more than one million agents, the company says.
However, these agents had limitations. They couldn’t connect to external data or use custom logic. External agents that companies used also had no way to connect to the Notion workspace. Teams had to solve these problems by using third-party automation platforms or writing their own scripts that run on their own infrastructure.
“It’s true that historically Notion hasn’t been the most developer-focused platform,” said Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, during the livestream. “But things are changing.”
Notion will now allow teams to deploy their own custom code. With its new Workers, Notion’s cloud-based environment for running custom code, customers can write their logic and deploy 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 in Notion, create custom tools, and trigger work with webhooks, which are automated signals that initiate actions when something happens in another application, without needing to rely on external infrastructure.
You don’t even have to write the code. The company notes that your preferred AI coding agent can do this for you.
Workers will use the same credit system as custom agents, but Notion will make it free until August, so developers can experiment.
Synchronization of external data sources is also part of the Notion Developer Platform. Powered by Workers, the database sync feature can pull data from any database with an API. That means you can access data from places like Salesforce, Zendesk, Postgres, and others within your own Notion databases and keep the data up to date.
Zhao noted that this means Notion users can now “use their Notion database as a canvas to power both their workflows and their agents.”
Workers can also create agent tools with custom logic, for those times when connecting to 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 work, and track their progress, as if they were one of Notion’s custom agents. At launch, Notion says that Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Decagon are supported partner agents, but it plans to add more.
There’s also an external agent API, if teams want to connect their own internal agents to Notion, such as ones they’ve created specifically for their company’s needs.
Developers and agents interact with the new Notion development platform through CLI notiona command-line tool for developers, available on the company’s Business and Enterprise plans.
The developer platform represents a shift in Notion’s strategy as it becomes more of a programmable platform than simply an app, setting it up to compete with other workflow automation platforms. As companies increasingly look to automate knowledge work and build internal AI systems, a platform that brings together agents, custom code, and live data in one place is starting to look less like a productivity application and more like a core infrastructure.
It also follows the broader trend among AI companies, which have gone beyond the AI chatbot to offer agent tools that can take actions across different software platforms.
“Any data, any tool, any agent — that’s the big picture of the Notion Developer Platform,” Zhao said.
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