Productivity software maker Sense enters the age of agents.
On live broadcast product announcement On Wednesday, the company, best known for its collaborative note-taking app, unveiled a new developer platform that extends the capabilities of its custom AI agents, connects with external agents and lets teams create 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 as more than a notebook of AI features and instead a hub where humans and agents can collaborate on tools and databases.
In February, Notion was released for the first time Custom Agents — AI partners that handle repetitive tasks, such as answering frequently asked questions, collecting status updates, and automating workflows. Since then, Notion customers have created over a million agents, the company says.
However, these agents had limitations. They could not connect to external data or use custom logic. The external agents used by the companies also had no way to connect to the Notion workspace. Teams had to solve these problems by using third-party automation platforms or by writing their own scripts that run on their own infrastructure.
“It’s true that, historically, Notion has not been the most developer-centric platform,” said Ivan Zhao, Notion co-founder and CEO, during the live stream. “But things change.”
Now, Notion will allow teams to develop their own custom code. With the new Workers, Notion’s cloud environment for running custom code, customers can write their logic and deploy it in a secure sandbox (an isolated environment that prevents code from interfering with other systems). This allows teams to do things like sync their data with Notion, build custom tools, and trigger work with webhooks—which are automated signals that trigger actions when something happens in another application—without having to rely on external infrastructure.
You don’t even need to write the code. The company notes that your preferred AI coding agent can do this for you.
Workers will use the same credit system as Custom Agents, but Notion will make it free until August so developers can experiment.
Synchronization of external data sources is also part of the Notion developer platform. With Workers support, the database synchronization feature can pull data from any database with an API. This means you could access data from places like Salesforce, Zendesk, Postgres, and more within your own Notion databases — and keep the data up to date.
Zhao noted that this means Notion users can now “use Notion’s database as a clean canvas to power both your workflows and your agents.”
Workers can also build agent tools with custom logic, for those times when connecting to a third party via MCP — short for Model Context Protocol, an emerging standard that allows AI tools to connect to external data and services — isn’t enough.
Another addition allows Notion users to directly chat with external AI agents they use, assign them work, and track their progress, just as if it were one of Notion’s custom agents. At launch, Notion says Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Decagon are supported partners, but plans to add more.
There’s also an external agent API if teams want to connect their own internal agents to Notion, such as those they’ve built specifically for their company’s needs.
Developers and agents interact with Notion’s new developer platform through the CLI concepta command-line tool for developers, available in the company’s Business and Enterprise Plans.
The developer platform represents a shift in strategy for Notion as it becomes more of a programmable platform than just an app, setting it up to compete with other workflow automation platforms. As enterprises increasingly seek to automate knowledge work and build in-house AI systems, a platform that connects agents, custom code, and live data in one place is starting to look less like a productivity app and more like a core infrastructure.
It also follows a broader trend among AI companies, which have moved beyond the AI chatbot to offer tools agencies can take actions on different software platforms.
“Any data, any tool, any agent — that’s the big picture for the Notion developer platform,” Zhao said.
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