Max Schoening: observation

Transcript context

…Speaking of superhero, I wasn't planning to talk about this, but I've been hearing a lot about how much people love your agent, the Notion AI agent that you all released. It's just coming up a lot of just like, wow, this is actually really useful with a lot of different people. It'd be interesting to hear what you think made it so successful. I know it was a long time before you guys launched it. Just like, what do you think is helping it be this useful and successful as a product out in the world? I would like it to be even better. So I'm like my own first critic, I guess. I've spent most of my day thinking about where it falls short, not how great it is, but I agree with you that I'm actually surprised at how ... This sounds so weird. I'm surprised how good it is, if that makes sense. Notion has always been fairly at the forefront of AI. I think the first Notion Assistant was actually launched before ChatGPT. And so it's not that ... I think both Ivan and Simon had the intuition of, "Hey, this is going to change a lot of things." And so that's a huge reason why, but every company wants to become AI native now, whatever that means. It's kind of like cloud native. I'm like, "If you have to say it, then are you really, do you have a chance?" But I'm surprised how fast that happened for Notion, and I'll take almost no credit in this. I think what's good about it is agents need context to operate in. Agents don't really like walls of like, "Oh, I have to go through this narrow orifice to talk to this other data repository." And I think for the first time, it is obvious to people why a connected workspace is actually valuable because it's great. I can have agents roam around and do that. And it touches on malleable software. I think of Notion as an operating system more so. And then in that case, it resembles the environment that coding agents are in with Unix much more than one might maybe intuitively think. So I think those all contribute. And then sometimes it's just we're just dumb enough to try hard things. And so I think our enterprise search is like this thing where we do a lot of automatic permission handling and so on that others don't. I don't know. You have to care. I'm going to come back to my quote from the Bible. I feel like that actually is an answer to this question that it was made for such a time as this. The fact that Notion basically has all the things about everything in your company is the perfect source of context for using AI and helping you work. So it's just like just being around long enough for, wow, okay, this is exactly what we've been meant to be. It's a nice job. Nice job, [inaudible 00:51:19].…

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