Notion takes a quiet approach to designing AI features: ‘You can’t have every new tool screaming at you’
· Fortune
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.
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“You can’t have every new tool screaming at you,” Randy Hunt, Notion’s head of design, told Fortune on the sidelines of the SuperAI 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 YouTube from showing off how they used the product. “The beauty of the tool is that it’s adaptable and like an empty container,” says Hunt, who joined Notion in 2024. “It feels good to use, which is why people form an emotional connection with the brand.”
Now, Notion has over 100 million users and more than ten offices worldwide, with annual revenue passing the $500 million threshold last year. Half of its business and enterprise users also now pay for AI features, according to CNBC. In January, GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, took part in a $270 million investment round, alongside other investors like Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, that valued Notion at $11 billion.
Singapore has emerged as a notable market for Notion. The platform has “over a million users” in the country, Hunt says, and cites locally-based firms like Supabase and Manus AI as customers.
Hunt says the firm doesn’t treat enterprise clients differently from individual consumers. “For most enterprise softwares, the people making the buying decision are not the people using it,” he said. “Yet, end users use consumer products on their phone every day when they go home. They know what good apps look and feel like, but they go into the workplace and they’re given tools where a purchasing decision was made largely on the basis of price.”
He adds that Notion “cares about that end-user experience the same way we care about a regular consumer user, because we believe everybody deserves good quality tools that are understandable.”
Last month, Notion rolled out its own developer platform, which allows users to build custom agents and incorporate existing AI models like Claude and Codex into their workspace. This is similar to moves by software firms including Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.
For Hunt, the platform is a clear expression of what it means to democratize design in that it allows non-technical users to be builders and engineers. “With technology, even those who don’t identify as designers can implement things that have design decisions embedded in them,” he says.
Ultimately, for platforms like Notion, Hunt believes that being adaptable is the trick to staying in the game. “We’re building products which are open and malleable, because new things will emerge and others will go,” he concluded. “Human behaviour, too, will likely change in unpredictable ways.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com