In October 2022, Notion cofounders Ivan Zhao and Simon Final had been in Cancun for an organization offsite once they acquired a ping from mates who labored at OpenAI. The ask — did they wish to preview GPT-4? — was sufficient to get them to skip all of the team-building actions and gap up of their lodge room to play with the brand new AI mannequin.
Zhao, the CEO, has since taken his productiveness app into the buzzy AI future. The generative AI increase, which actually took off only a few weeks after they returned from Mexico, proved to be excellent timing for Notion. It had spent a number of years constructing a note-taking app that, with the assistance of a number of viral TikTok moments, has come to build up greater than 20 million customers. Notion, final valued at $10 billion, had the core tech and an keen consumer base in place to implement a mature model of the duo’s lodge room GPT-4 hacks.
“It feels type of fortunate. We spent a bunch of years constructing a textual content editor and constructing a relational database. AI was like dropping in a model new automobile engine,” Zhao instructed Forbes from his headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission District, one block away from OpenAI’s principal workplace. “We’re basically changing into an AI-first firm.”
On Tuesday, Notion introduced a key step in that evolution: a brand new chatbot known as Q&A that may question data from all of the paperwork and databases saved in a consumer’s Notion workspace. Ask the bot a query, and it returns a solution with hyperlinks to the related pages the place it extracted that data. Cofounder Akshay Kothari instructed Forbes that Q&A has modified the best way he works by surfacing issues that in any other case won’t have occurred to him. As an alternative of looking for a particular piece of quarterly planning paperwork, for instance, he asks “What are we engaged on in This autumn?” and the chatbot returns an inventory of 10 paperwork with summaries about their contents.
If the know-how reminds you of ChatGPT or Claude, that could be as a result of it was constructed on prime of OpenAI and Anthropic’s newest fashions. “We clearly would favor extra firms engaged on fashions than much less,” Kothari mentioned. “However after we did our assessments throughout these totally different suppliers, we discovered [Claude 2 and GPT-4] to be vastly higher.”
Q&A represents the “second part” of Notion’s grand plan for AI, Zhao mentioned. The primary, a writing assistant for producing new textual content or summarizing present textual content in a doc, was launched in February. Inside two weeks of its announcement, 3 million individuals signed up for the waitlist. By April, 4 million individuals had used it. Cofounder Akshay Kothari instructed Forbes that the overwhelming majority of all its customers have now “tried” the AI providing, however declined to offer a particular quantity or disclose how many individuals are paying for it.
Kothari did share that the proportion of paying prospects has shifted from 90% particular person customers and 10% firms, to a couple of 50-50 cut up. That implies Notion has cleared a hurdle that has troubled some newer startups, most notably Jasper, which soared to a $1.5 billion valuation final summer season, however switched up CEOs in September after it struggled to draw enterprise prospects. “Corporations have realized the facility of this,” Kothari mentioned. “I’ve a sense Q&A will take us much more into B2B land as a result of it’s a product that’s remarkably helpful in a workforce setting.”
“I used to be skeptical about whether or not individuals had been prepared to pay, after which really wish to keep, on the paid plan. I’ve been stunned that individuals are fairly sticky,” Kothari mentioned, referring to sustained utilization of the product over time, although once more he declined to share particular numbers. He credit this partially to Notion’s present consumer base which has been habituated to utilizing its core app: “Having AI built-in the place you already work is tremendous crucial.”
“Think about a world the place the AI assistant isn’t solely simply providing you with solutions to your questions, but it surely may even do light-weight duties for you.”
Notion gives a freemium mannequin for its software program, however for now its AI instruments are paid-only, owing to the costly value of utilizing state-of-the-art AI fashions like GPT-4 as a substitute of open-source alternate options. “That is the type of factor we wish to simply provide to each particular person out of the field, however simply primarily based on the place the prices are as we speak, now we have to make it paid in order that we are able to pay our payments,” Kothari mentioned. Notion sometimes prices $10 per thirty days for the AI performance; he says the corporate isn’t shedding cash on AI.
Notion’s cofounders are comparatively tight-lipped about what comes subsequent, however mentioned that they’re engaged on increasing Q&A to look not simply Notion recordsdata, however data saved in different work apps like Slack or Zoom as nicely. A “third part” can also be underway. “Think about a world the place the AI assistant isn’t solely simply providing you with solutions to your questions, but it surely may even do light-weight duties for you,” Kothari says, a purpose which sounds just like the AI “brokers” that startups like Adept and Imbue try to create. In a broader sense, this places Notion on a collision course with the likes of Coda, Dropbox or Zoom, that are all vying to select off a few of Google Workspace and Microsoft 365’s market share because the central hub for work.
“Our principle is to present the consumer incentive to place increasingly issues in Notion and to plug Notion into the remainder of their software stacks,” Zhao says. “Then, it turns into like a magnet software.”
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