A few years ago, Notion was just the app for taking notes. Somewhere between databases, relations, and AI showing up, the internet started asking whether or not it's still a note taking app. Even Notion's own team took to X this week to chime in on the debate. In this episode, Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd take on the question.

Bryan realized he hasn't clicked the "New" button in Notion in months. That observation kicks off a bigger conversation about what actually changes when AI moves from answering your questions to acting on your behalf, the agency pyramid, and why handing more control to AI means holding onto your own principles tighter.

Bonus: leave a comment with your take - we're picking one person to send a t-shirt to!

In this episode of Notion State of Mind, Bryan and Josh unpack what’s starting to grind their gears about the way we use AI at work. It’s not the em dashes, obvious LLM phrasing, or the fact that people are using AI in the first place. It’s what happens when we start using it to replace the thinking, judgment, and effort behind the work.

Notion is the easiest software in the world to build in. It might also be the hardest to make stick. Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd dig into why those two things are connected, and what most people miss until they've already learned it the expensive way.

A 100-person company has 4,950 pairs of people who might need something from each other. Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd walk through Metcalfe's Law and Brooks' Law to illustrate why a growing network gets more valuable and a growing team gets harder to run.

Every time your AI answers a question, it wanders every aisle of your workspace to find it. Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd break down Agent Highways - Notion State's framework for handing agents a centralized map of your core systems, so they so they stop searching and start delivering. A shorter one this week, and the fastest way to make every agent you run cheaper, faster, and more consistent.

Notion State has a Slack channel built for yelling. All caps, fully encouraged. In this episode, Josh and Bryan sit down with Delivery Lead, Cherihan Hassun. Born in Brazil to a Lebanese father, raised in Canada, and now working from Germany, Cherihan's been translating between cultures her whole life, which makes her the right person to ask: how do you build culture across a globally distributed, fully remote team? 

Ollie Baron has watched technology waves make and unmake consulting firms for fifteen years. The AI wave has all the familiar signs: a gold rush, and a graveyard of firms built on tactics. Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd sit down with Notion's Global Consultants Lead to talk about how Notion's global ecosystem is building AI consulting firms that are built to last.

The Methodology Powering a Global Ecosystem of AI-Native Consulting Firms - Ollie Baron

Great consultants are never surprised and that's not luck, it's storyboarding. Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd make the case for storyboarding being the core discipline of consulting.

Most companies treat AI agents as one-off builds and drown in the maintenance. Bryan Takayama and Josh Redd sit down with Eva Zivanovic, Notion State's first hire and the lead on its largest agent deployments, to break down the CASS framework: a modular system where capabilities, archetypes, solutions, and systems let you improve one building block and cascade the upgrade across every agent you build.