Notion's best update wasn't AI

Hey,

Notion's been shipping agents nonstop this week, sub-agents that manage other sub-agents, meetings that write their own recaps, an agent that'll triage your inbox for you. But we're starting somewhere else: the features you've probably ignored all year that have nothing to do with AI at all.

Then we'll get into the agent stuff, because some of it's genuinely worth your time. One deadline either way: Notion shuts off the old alpha agent routes September 30. That's eight days from today.

Let's get into it.

In Today's Email 👀

• The best Notion features this year have nothing to do with AI

• Custom Agents can now manage their own team of sub-agents

• The 20 minutes of chores after every meeting just got automated away

• Agents are winning on efficiency, but quick capture is losing

3 Tips / Updates

1/ THE FEATURES YOU'VE BEEN SLEEPING ON (NO AI)

Skip the AI headlines for a second, because some of Notion's best updates all year had nothing to do with agents.

Dashboard view pulls multiple databases into one page under a single shared date filter, though it's gated to Business and Enterprise. Native page archiving finally kills the old fake-archive checkbox workaround: three dots, archive, done. The sidebar is now fully customizable with sections and shortcuts, database views can go icon-only, and Tabs, several mini-dashboards living on one page instead of one endless scroll, might be the single best quality-of-life change of the year.

Half of these have been live for months and most people still aren't using them. Notion's whole current pitch is agents and Skills, but Tabs, native archiving, and the sidebar rebuild are still doing the unglamorous daily work nobody tweets about.

2/ CUSTOM AGENTS CAN NOW MANAGE THEIR OWN TEAM OF AGENTS

A Custom Agent can now call other Custom Agents as sub agents, each with its own instructions, context, access, and even its own model. Instead of building one agent that tries to do everything, you build a primary agent that knows when to hand a piece of work to a specialist and bring the answer back.

The example Notion's using is a mobile PM agent that routes bug reports to a triage agent and metrics questions to a reporting agent, then folds both responses into one Slack update. The primary agent decides when to delegate and stitches the results back together itself. Remote is running its entire IT help desk on five agents set up this way, and says it's saving 500 thousand dollars a year doing it.

It's the same orchestrator pattern a lot of people have been hand building with skills for months, now shipped as an actual feature instead of something you had to wire together yourself.

3/ THE BORING PART AFTER EVERY MEETING HAS BEEN SOLVED

Every meeting ends with the same small pile of chores. Write the recap, file the action items, ping whoever missed it. Custom Agents can now pick that up automatically the moment a meeting summary is ready, working straight from the transcript and summary without anyone having to hand it off.

Pick which meetings actually matter, and the agent handles the rest, writing the status update, filing action items, or routing customer feedback straight into the right database.

Narrow use case on paper, but it's exactly the kind of task that quietly eats twenty minutes after every call and never feels important enough to fix on its own.

From The Community

Notion leaning further into agents is clearly where the real efficiency gains are, orchestrating sub agents, automating the boring parts of a meeting, that's genuinely useful and already saving real money for teams running it. But a good chunk of longtime users are feeling friction from the opposite direction: starting a fast, throwaway note has gotten harder, not easier, now that AI sits between you and a blank page.

The complaint isn't really about AI existing, it's about it getting in the way of the one moment that used to be instant, capturing a thought before it's gone. Plenty of people have quietly moved that specific job elsewhere, a plain notes app, a markdown vault, even the built-in notes app on their phone, while keeping Notion for the bigger, structured stuff it's actually built for. The most requested fix wasn't turning AI off completely, it was just wanting an actual toggle for it, instead of needing to email support to switch it off.

Both things can be true at once. The agentic direction is where the real leverage is, and the fastest possible way to jot something down still deserves to stay boring and simple.

Quick Links & Tools

Notion Agents iOS app is live: A standalone app just for agents, voice notes, photos, and meeting prep from your phone, with an agent finishing the task before you're back at your laptop.

Notion Agent can now connect to GitHub, Amplitude, and more: A new Custom MCP connection lets the agent pull context or take action in tools your team already uses, gated behind a confirmation step so nothing changes until you approve it. Beta, Business and Enterprise.

A new Skills library formalizes what's been building for months: Skills now live in a dedicated database structure with a shared library, so a team's best prompts stop disappearing into individual chats and docs.

Model picker got a companion, the Notion Knowledge Board: A new board scores model performance on real, everyday work instead of generic benchmarks.

Custom Agent Insights hit the Public API: Pull credit usage, completed runs, and status for any agent, and enable, disable, or cap usage programmatically. Business and Enterprise.

Agent SDK is in public beta: Continue Custom Agent conversations from your own app, trigger them externally, and stream results back. Business and Enterprise.

Notion Agent can now triage your inbox: Ask it to group notifications, surface what actually needs attention, and clear the rest.