Your Notion agent just got a browser

Hey,

Notion's Head of Product is quietly testing something called Browser Use inside Notion AI, and he'll turn it on for you if you ask the right way.

Your chats got pinnable this week too, a tiny fix that's going to save you an outsized amount of scrolling. And your agent just picked up a calendar: join calls, send invites, move meetings, all from chat, no clicking required. Three real changes, one email, no fluff.

Let's get into it.

In Today's Email 👀

• Notion's testing "Browser Use" for agents, ask and you can get early access

• You can now pin your favorite AI chats

• Your agent just picked up a calendar

• A mobile capture app, a DIY vestaboard, and an underrated file update

3 Tips / Updates

1/ BROWSER USE IS COMING TO NOTION AI (AND YOU CAN ASK FOR EARLY ACCESS RIGHT NOW)

Notion's Head of Product Akshay Kothari posted this week that he's testing a "Browser Use" capability inside Notion AI: agents that can browse the web, log into gated sites, and pull content from behind a login wall straight into a Notion page.

It's not public. Kothari said he'll turn it on for anyone who replies to his post or DMs him a specific use case.

This is the feature that turns Notion AI from "reads what's already in your workspace" into "goes and gets what isn't." Logging into gated sites on your behalf is the detail worth paying attention to, that's a real capability jump, not a demo trick.

It's hand-picked early access, not a rollout. No public timeline, and Kothari is fielding requests directly, so there's no guarantee everyone who asks gets in.

Reply to his post or send a DM with one specific, real use case. Something like "pull my competitor's pricing page into a tracker" beats a vague "sounds cool." Specific asks are the ones that get turned on.

2/ YOU CAN NOW PIN YOUR FAVORITE NOTION AI CHATS

Notion shipped chat pinning on July 17. Pin the conversations you go back to so you're not scrolling through your entire chat history hunting for the thread with your onboarding SOP or your quarterly planning prompt.

This is a tiny feature that's going to save an outsized amount of scrolling. It's the kind of unglamorous fix that never makes a keynote slide but shows up in your daily workflow immediately.

Pinned chats don't sync to the Notion Agents iOS app or the regular Notion iOS app yet, and there's still no way to link a chat directly to a page. If your workflow spans devices, you'll notice the gap.

Open your 3 most-referenced AI chats right now and pin them. See how much faster you find them next time you need that context.

3/ YOUR AGENT CAN NOW RUN YOUR CALENDAR

Notion's agent picked up a new skill set this week: your schedule. It can pull up what's on your calendar, move meetings around, and even generate scheduling links, all without leaving the chat.

Ask "what's on my schedule today" and get a straight answer. Tell it to move your 2pm with Sandra to 1pm and it just does it. Need a link for someone to grab time with you tomorrow between 2 and 5? Ask and it's built.

It's a small feature on paper, but it closes a gap that's been nagging at Notion's agent story. Tasks and docs living inside Notion is one thing. Actually running your day from there is another, and that's the harder problem to solve.

Calendar management works on desktop for now, with mobile support on the way. To turn it on, ask your agent to connect your calendar, or head to Settings then Connections.

Poll / From The Community

A conversation making the rounds this week was less a complaint than a wish list, and the top item wasn't even a new feature. It was permissions. People want to share a database with view only access to some fields and not others, so a birthday calendar doesn't also hand out salary data.

Right behind it: recurring tasks that don't need a formula workaround, and grouping database views by a rollup value, neither of which exist today.

Some of the gripes were about polish rather than power. Full width as a default, page titles hidden in database views, highlight colors beyond the current presets. Underneath all of it sat the same complaint: recent updates have leaned toward AI and upsells while these smaller, older requests keep getting skipped.

Quick Links & Tools

Nudge - an indie mobile capture app for Notion → A builder made a small companion app that captures text or voice notes on mobile and drops them straight into a Notion inbox, offline-first with sync when you reconnect. Early and rough, and they're looking for a handful of testers. Check it out and volunteer if quick-capture-on-mobile is a gap you feel too.

A DIY vestaboard built entirely with an HTML block → Ian McClanan built a coworker message board using a single Notion HTML block, then invited coworkers to send messages to it. Notion's official account reposted it, and it kicked off a small wave of copycats in the replies: a Pomodoro timer, a prayer database display, a family version. If you wanted proof HTML blocks aren't just a demo feature, this thread is it.

Underrated update: Notion AI can now read and write files → Akshay also flagged this one himself as underrated: upload a file to give Notion AI external context, then use Computer tools to export whatever you build as a PDF or another file format. He demoed turning a plain database into a printable PDF. One reply mentioned generating a full newspaper-style layout from a bookmarks database. Worth trying if you've ever wanted a database to leave Notion looking presentable.