Notion AI is a productivity booster, but it's not for me

In these times of AI-everything, it shouldn’t be a surprise that your favorite productivity tool comes with a slice of AI built in as well. I’ve talked a fair bit about my love for Notion. Predictably, it includes its own AI integration powered by ChatGPT.

Notion AI isn’t new. In fact, the company got in on the LLM action pretty early and introduced the feature way back in February 2023.

I’ve been reluctant to let an AI model have access to all my personal thoughts and work-related notes. However, a few weeks back, I finally caved and decided to give it a shot. So, how did my experiment with Notion AI go? Here’s the CliffNotes version — it’s not for me. But it might just be the perfect productivity enhancer for a certain kind of user. Here’s why.

What is Notion AI?

Instead of creating its own LLM model, Notion AI is built on GPT-4 and Claude APIs and leverages all the capabilities of those GPT models. The AI tools work on your own personal data and can be leveraged to perform a range of activities.

Think writing assistance, text generation, brainstorming, outlines, research, and organization. It’s the standard ChatGPT capabilities fine-tuned to perform well on your personal data. Building Notion AI on top of ChatGPT makes sense given the latter’s rapid pace of development and relatively advanced state.

How do I use Notion AI?

Notion is my catalog of notes, drafts, interesting articles, places to visit, and much more. As such, it is very often a dumping ground for text that I leave aside for later — or never — to organize.

So, I decided to see if AI could help me triage my long list of notes and articles in Notion. I decided to start simple and used Notion AI to generate summaries for a number of long-form reads in my Notion. It’s similar to the summarize function built into a number of apps and even integrated into phones. Notion AI is able to read an article and give you a concise CliffNotes version of the copy that you can quickly glance through. It works well.

But Notion AI’s capabilities go a step further. For example, I’ve been using Notion AI to generate templates to help me plan a forthcoming trip. While Notion’s built-in templates are pretty good, you can use Notion AI to create templates that are specifically tuned for your use case. In this case, I wanted a day-by-day template that helped me plan each day of the trip. Since I couldn’t find an existing template that achieved that, I used Notion AI to generate one. It’s quick and easy and takes away the tedium of having to make these manually.

It gets even better. You see, I’ve been saving information about places that interest me directly to Notion. Since Notion AI operates directly on the information in your workspace, it can create granular itineraries based on things that interest you instead of serving up a generic travel itinerary. I tried it out for an upcoming trip, and the results offered up were a surprisingly good way to start building a day-by-day plan.

This ability to search and read information across your entire workspace is also particularly nifty for other forms of data handling. For example, you could have separate pages tracking investments in a variety of instruments. Personally, I maintain separate pages for stocks, mutual funds, and crypto. Notion AI is able to scan through these separate pages and help me draw tables, charts, and more.

Next, a key part of my work is brainstorming. However, there are days when I might be feeling a creative block or might be unable to figure out a great approach for an article. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with brainstorming articles with Notion AI. Of course, like most AI tools, you can’t trust it to give you good results out of the box. To optimize the results, I usually create a new page where I put down pointers, my own thoughts on the matter, and maybe some interesting insights that I discovered during research. I then tried using Notion AI to brainstorm a good approach or suggestions for an article flow. The suggestions, like all things AI, can be a bit hit or miss, but I can’t deny that it helped me create a more formal structure for a write-up. Moreover, it can often bring up points that I might’ve missed out on otherwise. Nifty.

In my spare time, I try to catch up on the latest research journals. But lately, free time has been rather limited. Remember when I mentioned that Notion is my dumping ground for all things interesting? That includes interesting PDF research papers and journals gathered from the internet. I’ve been trying out Notion AI’s PDF parsing capabilities to create bullet-point notes on interesting reads. With my limited spare time, this has been an excellent way to stay up to date on all the latest happenings in science without having to commit to reading a 10-pager or more. Moreover, since Notion AI is operating directly on the PDF, I can be reasonably sure that the summarization will be free of hallucinations.

Notion AI isn’t for me

For all its capabilities, there’s not much here that can’t be done in ChatGPT for free. I’m not a fan of subscription fees, and the $8 tacked on per member in a workspace adds up. Don’t get me wrong, Notion AI, if you can find a use case for it, is rather excellent. But for all the use cases I listed above, the majority of my Notion use had no AI actions at all. If I have to invest in an AI tool, I’d rather pick up a general-purpose tool that can perform most of the same functions without being shackled to Notion.

That, however, is not a ding on Notion AI’s capabilities. I went in skeptical of its capabilities and came away rather impressed with the productivity boost it can offer — provided it aligns with how you use Notion.