Welcome: Notion AI Agents in Practice: Translation, Learning Systems & Law Firms🪄 (Ep. 1)
Notion in PracticeShow Notes
What if your AI could build you a learning curriculum while you sleep? Or translate a Korean interview in real time with cultural context?
This is Episode 1 of Notion in Practice, where Tim Jeffries (Notion Certified Consultant) and Jerwin Parker Roberto (Official Notion Ambassador) show you how practitioners actually use Notion's AI features to solve real problems.
Why Notion's AI is Different Most AI tools need constant context setting. You copy paste project details into ChatGPT every single time. Notion AI already knows your clients, projects, and workflows because it sits on top of your structured data. Tim explains how this changes everything from writing proposals to qualifying leads to following up meetings.
A Custom Agent That Teaches You While You Sleep?? Tim built a custom AI agent that turns a single article into a progressive learning system.
Each day, the agent creates a new task based on what you need to learn next, reviews your work, gives feedback, and either advances you or asks you to try again. Like having a personal instructor who never forgets where you left off.
Breaking Language Barriers in Real Time Jerwin interviewed a Korean Notion Ambassador, Leese, without speaking Korean.
Notion AI translated the conversation in real time, provided cultural context, and helped him write an accurate article in under 10 minutes.
Tim had a similar experience translating a client's Cantonese phone call on the fly. These aren't demos. They're actual workflows.
From Manila Folders to Digital First in One Year In 2018, Tim discovered Notion on Product Hunt and convinced his cousin's law firm to go all in.
They migrated 25 years of legal documents, built workflows for child protection lawyers, and structured everything around clients, cases, and document types.
The firm tripled in size in year one. Tim shares what worked and what nearly broke the migration.
The Shift Happening Right Now Tim sees a fundamental change in how people approach Notion. Clients used to ask: "Help us get organized." Now they ask: "Help us leverage AI."
The structure still matters but the results are exponentially greater.
Three Actions You Can Take Today: Set up personalized AI instructions with context about your work, clients, and goal: Instructions: https://www.smoothops.consulting/ai-instructions Webinar: https://youtu.be/KRu9OkOqxiY Build one simple custom agent for a repetitive task (proposals, meeting notes, learning) Use AI translation to record cross language conversations and capture context
Perfect for: Notion power users, startup founders, operations managers, consultants building AI powered workflows.
More from Notion in Practice
Flight Centre Travel Group's Matt Upton explains how his automation team uses Notion, Notion Workers and Notion AI skills at enterprise scale, and why nothing gets automated until the process behind it is fixed. Matt is Head of Automation and Innovation for Flight Centre's Asia Pacific corporate brands, leading a team of around 30 across five brands from India and the Middle East to Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Inside a 12,500-person business, the work ranges from multi-step customer onboarding automations to five-minute tasks done 500 times a day. He joins Tim Jeffries and Jerwin Parker on Notion in Practice to walk through how his part of the business made Notion its single source of truth. Information used to be spread across Confluence, Azure DevOps, SharePoint, OneDrive and local files, and nothing joined up. Flight Centre's corporate technology teams now have roughly 1,000 Notion seats. "I tell people if it's not in Notion, it doesn't exist," Matt says, and that rule is what made the change stick. Who this is for Operations, automation and technology leaders fitting Notion, Workers and Notion AI into an existing enterprise stack, and smaller teams who want the same discipline without the headcount. Why can't you automate a bad process? Because automation speeds up whatever process it runs on. Matt's team won't automate anything until it has been through a continuous improvement pass. As Tim puts it, automating a bad process just makes the chaos go faster and the mess grow quicker. How did Notion take hold at Flight Centre? Microsoft Loop opened the door. Notion had been in the business for years with only a handful of real users, and once teams saw collaborative documents working in Loop, a few people pointed out that Notion already did this at scale. How does Matt's team sync Smartsheet and Azure DevOps with Notion? With Notion Workers, small pieces of code deployed to Notion. Matt has seven or eight Smartsheets plus Azure DevOps syncing into Notion databases this way, set up in a short conversation with a coding tool and left to run without babysitting. Most Workers do one plain job like this. How do you build a Notion Worker? Start with a brief. Tim gets clear on the problem with Notion AI, then hands the brief and the Worker docs to Claude Code. His Worker was deployed and working within an hour. Do you have to migrate everything into Notion? No. Smartsheet and Azure DevOps stay where they are as the data layer, Notion becomes the context and reporting layer on top, and Workers keep the two in sync. The episode also covers Notion as "the Switzerland of AI", connecting different models and tools. Three actionable takeaways Run a continuous improvement pass before you automate anything. Leave your system of record where it is and use Notion Workers to sync the data into Notion. Start every Worker with a brief from Notion AI, then point a coding tool at the brief and the Worker docs. Resources mentioned Tim's article "You already have a digital operating system": https://smoothopsconsulting.substack.com/p/you-already-have-a-digital-operating
AI doesn't run in a vacuum. It runs inside a world: the platforms your work lives on, the records that hold the truth, the rules about what happens next. Most AI disappointment isn't a model problem. It's that there was never a world built around it.
Tokens don't grow on trees. So what are you actually paying for when you pay for AI agents?
In Episode 9 of Notion in Practice, Tim Jeffries and Jerwin Parker tackle the question on every Notion power user's mind: what will custom agents actually cost and is it worth it?
What happens when a former lawyer becomes Head of Operations at a scaling startup and decides to build an entire ops function using Notion agents?