The Exchanges

Q AI, could you create an AI first Notion, but then Notion You know, sort of squash that by, by moving, uh, fast. And then precisely as a second, second point that how quickly you did it, uh, I think was very well noticed and very well received by the, the community. So congratulations on that. But to start from the top on AI. So what, what does notion AI do?

A Yeah. Um, so we are in the early period of, of AI features and products like notion. Um, and so we were, we were focused on getting something out into the world pretty quickly. Um, today notion AI, I would say is, um, It, it can add, it can add value to anything you're trying to do around creating content in Notion. Um, what we end up finding, uh, over time is that a lot of the most intensely used use cases of, of the current Notion AI experience are around kind of summarization, improving content. Um, you know, one of the really standard ones that a lot of people use are, uh, is, You know, generating action items for meeting notes. Like, that's the thing that comes up a lot. Summarizing that content, we have some automated ways of, like, you can create a block at the top of a page and it will automatically update with a summary as that page changes. So imagine you're developing, you're working collaboratively with your team, with your team, you're building out, I think we often are doing, or, like, writing, like, a product requirements doc or something like that. You want a summary of that at the top so people can quickly glance and see, is this the thing I'm looking for right now? Um, so those are some really common use cases. Another one that came up for us a lot is, um, and this one's like, this is, this is very much a commoditizable thing is, um, but nonetheless really val…

AI assessment note: “today notion AI, I would say is... creating content in Notion.”

Q from the very top, the founders, and then a small group just to play it back, a small dedicated, um, uh, group. Okay. What, um, do you think companies need to, um, already have in a, in order to be able to do that, whether that's a team or platform or having your data in order, or like what are the preconditions to being able to successfully deploy AI quickly?

A Yeah, I think it, I mean, I think it's gonna look pretty different depending on what stage your company is at. Um, I think for us, um, the biggest things that we benefited, are benefiting from, I think, are, um, Number one, that a lot of the initial use cases for, uh, around notion AI were actually things that we could build basically by integrating some partners, uh, by leveraging some of the partners, uh, that you mentioned, and, um, just, like, Uh, AI aware product engineers, which we happen to have a few of. So that was great. Um, and it also helps that one of our co-founders who still actively writes code, um, was in his own world working on this for some time as well. Um, and so that gave us an advantage initially. Now, for, like, where we're going from here, I think for us at a company at our stage, it's really, it's beneficial for us that there were some critical data transformation and processing problems that we were already working on, and that's an advantage for us, I hope, going forward. Um, so, for example, some of the ways we need to process All of the content in Notion workspaces given the way that data is structured depends on some really large scale processing that we had started to do for the purposes of, to some extent, internal analytics for search and other use cases as well. And so now we're kind of in this mode where Um, and this is kind of fun because I…

AI assessment note: “critical data transformation and processing problems that we were already working on”

Q So we'll, we'll, we'll spend a good amount of time on AI. Um, while we are on the topic of, uh, infrastructure, uh, to the extent that you can talk about it, what does a stack look like? What do you guys use as a, I don't know, data warehouse, like the various tools and systems?

A Yeah, for sure. Some of those, some of those people, we've let people have logos of our logo on their websites. I feel like I can share those ones. Um, I mean, we use Snowflake internally for my, the core data warehouse. We also have our own data lake infrastructure that we've built out ourselves on top of S three. We're in AWS, mostly in AWS today. Um, we, um, we use for kind of internal analytics stuff. Uh, we use hacks as a product actually quite a bit. Um, so we're an earlier user of hacks that actually happened before I even started. Um, we've expanded it quite rapidly across the company. Um, we, you know, we have used a lot of, I think, you know, maybe I'll step back a little bit. In my understanding of the history of the data infrastructure at Notion is that it actually predates any data team at all. We had a head of growth who was there in probably 2018, 2019, who stood up pretty much exactly what I think you would stand up if you didn't have a data team and you wanted to use various vendors to solve your problems at that point in time. And it was Snowflake, lots of companies use Snowflake, but we had a lot of other, some of these other vendors, I don't want to name all their names, but things you use for ingestion, things you use for, um, Uh, for data transformation. Um, and I think what's happened over the last couple of years at Notion is there are parts of our stack…

AI assessment note: “we use Snowflake internally for my, the core data warehouse.”

Q What about the UI, UX aspect of this, and how to just deploy AI in production at scale to a bunch of users who may not be familiar with what AI can do?

A Yeah, for sure. So, first off, I think the initial version of Notion AI that you all have seen is, it's not a radical transformation of the Notion user experience. I think that's on purpose. I think we're all gonna be going on a journey In the next couple of years in, and this I think is a big part of what people talk about when they talk about a platform shift, or the term buzzword that we keep hearing, is The, we need to start from a standpoint where people have an understanding of how they start to use this product. Over time, I actually think there will be a more radical transformation to the user experience. I don't think it's all, I personally don't think it's all chat all the time. It's like the way we're all going to interact with all products. But there are going to be, you know, we're already starting to think about, okay, as we go deeper in this direction, what are, what are some of the ways our overall product surfaces are going to need to change and evolve, given the overall mission that we have Around making software tool making ubiquitous. Around allowing really easy collaboration and knowledge sharing. I do think that's going to change over time. But in the short term, it's really about how do you Create ways of integrating AI into the experience in ways that are very natural. And I think Notion, Notion's advantage here as a company and as an organization is tha…

AI assessment note: “it's not a radical transformation of the Notion user experience. I think that's on purpose.”