Show Notes
Custom Agents are the next step for Notion AI: not just answering questions, but running real workflows in the background.
In this hosts-only deep dive, Tim Jeffries and Jerwin Parker break down what Custom Agents are, how they differ from the “regular” Notion AI experience, and how to think about implementing them safely in a team.
Tim and Jerwin walks through the Custom Agents interface, including triggers, activity logs, permissions, and integrations, then shares a set of practical agents Smooth Ops has been using to reduce admin overhead and increase project context.
In this episode, we cover Custom Agents vs Notion AI: what changes when AI can run autonomously Personalized instructions and playbooks: the foundation for consistent outputs Triggers: schedule-based runs, property-based triggers, and Slack/Calendar/Mail possibilities Permissions and governance: what the agent can access, and how sharing agents can extend access Real examples (Tim): meeting follow-up, Slack context capture, email-to-CRM logging, lead intake automation, and project status updates Real example (Jerwin @ TrustOnCloud): a meeting triage custom agent for a marketing leader to capture actions, track accountability, and keep momentum after internal calls Ambient context: why Tim rebuilds a daily context page overnight so AI stays “stateful” across conversations
Three Actionable Takeaways Takeaway #1: Start with personalized instructions + playbooks before you build agents.Build a reliable “baseline assistant” first, then turn repeatable playbooks into agents once you trust the workflow.
Takeaway #2: Treat agents like employees: define the job, grant minimal access, then audit regularly.Good outcomes come from clear instructions, tight permissions, and reviewing activity logs.
Takeaway #3: Use agents to capture context automatically (meetings, Slack, email) so work stays “stateful.”The more structured context lives in Notion, the less the AI has to guess, and the better the outputs become.
Hosts:Tim Jeffries — Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · YouTube Jerwin Parker — Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · YouTube
Resource Tim mentioned (Episode gift): https://www.notion.com/templates/how-to-build-ai-playbooks
Who this is for Operators, consultants, founders, and Notion power users who want to automate repeatable work, reduce cognitive load, and keep project context up to date without relying on memory.
Subscribe for more practical episodes on building real systems in Notion, with workflows you can copy and adapt.
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?