Notion's New AI Agents for Work Blew Me Away (Full Tutorial) | Akshay & Ryan

Notion's New AI Agents for Work Blew Me Away (Full Tutorial) | Akshay & Ryan

Author: Peter Yang October 19, 2025 Duration: 53:32

Everyone calls their AI product an “agent” but Notion’s actually live up to the hype. It took Akshay (Notion’s co-founder) and Ryan (AI lead) 2 years of failure to build agents that can create databases, respond to Slack, and more. We had a great chat about their most surprising lessons from building the best AI agents for work.

We talked about:

  • (00:00) What it really took to build agents that actually work

  • (01:38) Live demo: Watch a database build itself in real-time

  • (04:56) How Akshay writes docs by just talking to AI 90% of the time

  • (20:15) The real difference between AI slop and useful AI agents

  • (34:43) Personalizing agents with custom memory and instructions

  • (39:59) Live demo: Building a custom Notion agent for Slack

  • (49:03) What Notion looks for when hiring AI-native builders

Get the takeaways: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/how-notion-built-the-best-ai-agents-for-work-akshay-ryanWhere to find:

Akshay: https://x.com/akothari

Ryan: https://x.com/_ryannystrom

Notion AI agents: https://www.notion.com/blog/introducing-notion-3-0

📌 Subscribe to this channel – more interviews coming soon!


For anyone building the future, Behind the Craft is a conversation with Peter Yang that moves beyond theory and into the tangible details of creation. This podcast lives in the messy, rewarding space where ideas become real products. Each episode is built on candid interviews with experts who have been in the trenches, dissecting the pivotal decisions, the unexpected hurdles, and the hard-won lessons that rarely make it into a polished case study. You’ll hear the unvarnished stories behind the features and companies shaping our world, focusing on the practical frameworks and mental models that effective product leaders and creators rely on daily. It’s about understanding the craft from the inside out-the strategic shifts, the team dynamics, the user insights that truly move the needle. Tune in for a direct, no-fluff dialogue designed to accelerate your own journey, providing actionable guidance you can apply immediately to level up your own work. This is where the blueprint meets the build.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Behind the Craft
Podcast Episodes
Why You Should Push Yourself to Do Hard Things | Nat Eliason (Author) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:13
My guest today is Nat Eliason, one of my favorite writers online. Nat is the author of Crypto Confidential, a real-life thriller about how he made and lost millions in crypto. We also talked about how Nat uses AI to edit…
Proven Rituals of Great Product Teams | Lane Shackleton (CPO Coda) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:08
My guest today is Lane Shackleton, Chief Product Officer of Coda. Lane has interviewed hundreds of product teams from Figma, Uber, Spotify, and more as the chief product officer of Coda. He shared with me his favorite ri…
Unlock Your Storytelling Superpower | Robbie Crabtree (Coach) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:31
My guest today is Robbie Crabtree, founder of Competitive Storytelling. Robbie is a top storytelling coach who has helped hundreds of founders raise $600M+ through this skill. Before that, he perfected his storytelling c…