I’m Betting on the Most Overlooked Power Platform in AI 

I’ve been fascinated with technology since the original Nintendo. It continued to blossom once I started using Prodigy, and then AOL, over dial-up. I loved my PCs, then I loved my Mac. I loved my BlackBerry, and then I loved my iPhone.

When I graduated from my MBA, I went to work at the intersection of people and technology doing interactive marketing and social media.

Technology Gaps

My own fascination with technology has led me to read the work of those at the forefront of technological change.

In my professional career, I’ve interacted with a lot of people with varying degrees of technology proficiency. A lot of my work has placed me in the position of being the most capable and skilled in any given room as it relates to the use of technology. I am often turned to as a resource by those who hope I can bring them current or give them an edge against their own contemporaries.

As we find ourselves thoroughly immersed in the era of artificial intelligence, I’m seeing a similar gap emerge as I have in every other cycle. Mass adoption of and fluency with a technology often lags far behind those at the forefront. While we see companies engaged in mass layoffs to allocate resources toward artificial intelligence, the truth is that the number of people on the inside of those organizations who deeply understand the technology are few in number. The number of those in the general public, among the labor class, or who work for themselves, that have the technological fluency to deeply understand these technologies are likewise few, and with even less access to capital.

The Missing Ownable Infrastructure

While all of the dominant large language model (LLM) tools are doing their best to keep things simple for the average user, the problem that surfaces is always in accuracy and personalization.

Sure, many of these tools will inevitably go the way of social networks and begin collecting information without our consent and then “personalizing” the experience. Either that or manipulating the direction that we go.

But from the standpoint of enabling us to do advanced work on our own terms, they’re sorely lacking because of a missing ownable infrastructure with which to operate on top of.

The Developer’s Toolkit Problem

When you look at advanced AI usage or capabilities, it typically requires a certain level of expertise. So even though tools like Claude Code are remarkably powerful, the truth is obvious: most people are not comfortable in the command line or even an IDE like VS Code. They will struggle to understand folder structures and glaze over as we explain the benefits of markdown.

The technical overhead is a barrier the majority of people will never overcome.

This is the foundational setting for why I believe Notion’s AI product is so powerful –– and why I believe it should be so attractive to most people as a method for going from beginner to intermediate or advanced in how they use AI tools.

Why Notion is an Attractive Solution for Advanced AI

I believe the technical hurdles to advanced AI are the very reason why Notion is such a strong option for most people. What it’s doing is providing access to large language models and then layering it on top of an interconnected information management system.

While you can plug Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini into other tools, Notion provides a singular ecosystem that is adaptable to a multitude of different functions simply by setting up a new type of template, and then allowing you to work within a single workspace for various types of tasks. With just a few additional types of modules, Notion could provide a platform for just about any type of work.

A Familiar Interface, A Powerful Backend

Notion sidesteps a lot of the technical problems because you can have a pre-setup workspace where all of the rules are already in place.

The way most users would interact with the tool is virtually the same as it would be in using Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini: a chat interface. But behind the scenes, you have the ability to easily connect to any resource in your Notion workspace. You can point your AI to any resource and to any instructions. Rather than learning how to operate in a developer environment, you get to work within what feels like a chat interface combined with a note-taking tool.

Hiding in Plain Sight

I think this is grossly overlooked because Notion AI is not in and of itself its own AI, but rather utilizes the large language models that are out there, but in a structured environment. For the same cost as a ChatGPT or Claude subscription, you can get unlimited access to both, and Gemini, and more.

For those who wish to do advanced AI work, rather than learning how to manage all of the complexities of MCPs and IDEs and command lines and permission structures, working inside of the Notion environment is by comparison profoundly simple and yet equally as powerful.

The only hurdles that remain are at the truly advanced level and in the world of coding. But for most users –– those writing copy, keeping track of contacts, looking at their financials –– all of that can be managed within a single tool. And that tool is Notion AI.

Why I’m All In

One of the reasons I’m betting so heavily on Notion AI is because it’s the system that I use for myself. It would be hard to enumerate all of the ways in which Notion has helped me to be more productive, keep track of my priorities, and be able to support and help more people.

I believe the best technology should be powerful, but easy to use and widely accessible for people to take advantage of.

The people I seek to help with technology are less so Fortune 500 companies and more so those that want to just live a better life by keeping better track of what they’re working on, and automating away repetitive work.

I want people to have more time to spend with those they love and do more impactful work with less stress.

Sharing What Works

I’ve spent a lot of time developing my own system inside of Notion, and the benefit of Notion is that I can make that system widely available to people.

Any page you create, you can share as a template for people to download and duplicate into their own workspace. So as I develop my own organizational system and knowledge base, I can share it. As I develop my own rules for how my AI works, I can share it.

I’m continually updating and improving this system and plan to make available everything that winds up helping me, so that it can in turn help others.

I’m working to take the guesswork out of it and saving people from having to learn or build an entirely new system on their own.