Notion has turned its workspace into a hub for AI agents.

Productivity software maker Notion is entering the agent era.

The company, best known for its collaborative note-taking app, introduced a new developer platform in a live streaming product announcement Wednesday that expands the capabilities of custom AI agents, connects them with external agents, and lets teams build automated, multi-step workflows that can pull data from any database.

By building an orchestration layer, a system that coordinates AI work across multiple tools and data sources, Notion is positioning itself to be more than just an AI-powered note taker, but instead a hub for people and agents to collaborate across tools and databases.

Last February, Notion first launched Custom Agents, AI team members that handle repetitive tasks like answering frequently asked questions, compiling status updates, and automating workflows. Since then, Notion customers have deployed more than a million agents, the company says.

However, these agents had limitations. You cannot connect to external data or use custom logic. The external agents the company used also had no way to connect to the Notion workspace. Teams had to solve these problems by using third-party automation platforms or writing their own scripts that ran on their own infrastructure.

“Historically, it is true that Notion has not been a developer-centric platform,” Ivan Zhao, Notion co-founder and CEO, said during the livestream. “But things are changing.”

Notion now allows teams to deploy their own custom code. The new Worker, Notion’s cloud-based environment for running custom code, allows customers to write logic and deploy it in a secure sandbox – an isolated environment that prevents the code from interfering with other systems. This allows teams to sync data to Notion, build custom tools, trigger actions using webhooks, automated signals that initiate actions when problems occur in other apps, and more without relying on external infrastructure.

You don’t even need to write any code. The company points out that your preferred AI coding agent can do this for you.

Workers uses the same credit system as Custom Agents, but Notion is making it free until August so developers can experiment.

External data source synchronization is also part of the Notion developer platform. The worker-driven database synchronization feature can pull data from any database using APIs. This means you can access data from Salesforce, Zendesk, Postgres, and other places within your own Notion database and keep it up-to-date.

Zhao said this means Notion users can now “use the Notion database as a pure canvas that powers both workflows and agents.”

Because it’s not enough to connect with third parties through MCP (short for Model Context Protocol), an emerging standard that allows AI tools to connect to external data and services, workers can also build agent tools with custom logic.

Another additional feature will allow Notion’s users to chat directly with any external AI agent they use, assign tasks to them, and track their progress as if they were one of Notion’s own custom agents. At launch, Notion said that Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Decagon were supported partner agents, but it plans to add more.

There’s also an external agent API if you want to connect internal agents with Notion, such as ones your team has built specifically for your company’s needs.

Developers and agents interact with Notion’s new developer platform through Notion CLI, a command-line tool for developers available on the company’s Business and Enterprise plans.

The developer platform represents a change in Notion’s strategy as it becomes more of a programmable platform rather than just an application, and is set to compete with other workflow automation platforms. As companies increasingly look to automate knowledge work and build internal AI systems, platforms that bring together agents, custom code, and live data are starting to look more like core infrastructure than productivity apps.

This also follows a broader trend of AI companies going beyond AI chatbots and providing agent tools that can take action across a variety of software platforms.

“All the data, tools, agents, etc. are the big picture of the Notion developer platform,” Zhao said.