“Imagine a world where the AI assistant is not only just giving you answers to your questions, but it could even do lightweight tasks for you,” Kothari says, a goal which sounds similar to the AI “agents” that startups like Adept and Imbue are attempting to create. Notion’s cofounders are relatively tight-lipped about what comes next, but said that they’re working on expanding Q&A to search not just Notion files, but information stored in other work apps like Slack or Zoom as well. Notion typically charges $10 per month for the AI functionality he says the company is not losing money on AI. “This is the kind of thing we want to just offer to every person out of the box, but just based on where the costs are today, we have to make it paid so that we can pay our bills,” Kothari said. Notion offers a freemium model for its software, but for now its AI tools are paid-only, owing to the expensive cost of using state-of-the-art AI models like GPT-4 instead of open-source alternatives. “Imagine a world where the AI assistant is not only just giving you answers to your questions, but it could even do lightweight tasks for you.” He credits this in part to Notion’s existing user base which has been habituated to using its core app: “Having AI integrated where you already work is super critical.” I’ve been surprised that people are pretty sticky,” Kothari said, referring to sustained usage of the product over time, though again he declined to share specific numbers. “I was skeptical about whether people were willing to pay, and then actually want to stay, on the paid plan. “I have a feeling Q&A will take us even more into B2B land because it’s a product that’s remarkably useful in a team setting.” “Companies have realized the power of this,” Kothari said. That suggests Notion has cleared a hurdle that has troubled some newer startups, most notably Jasper, which soared to a $1.5 billion valuation last summer, but switched up CEOs in September after it struggled to attract enterprise customers. Kothari did share that the proportion of paying customers has shifted from 90% individual users and 10% companies, to about a 50-50 split. Cofounder Akshay Kothari told Forbes that the vast majority of all its users have now “tried” the AI offering, but declined to provide a specific number or disclose how many people are paying for it. Within two weeks of its announcement, 3 million people signed up for the waitlist. The first, a writing assistant for generating new text or summarizing existing text in a document, was released in February.

Q&A represents the “second phase” of Notion’s grand plan for AI, Zhao said. “But when we did our tests across these different providers, we found to be vastly better.” “We obviously would prefer more companies working on models than less,” Kothari said. If the technology reminds you of ChatGPT or Claude, that may be because it was built on top of OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest models.

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