Notion has a new A.I. feature than be used to provide outlines, ideas, suggestions for organization and more. I decided I wanted to use Notion to make a database of my areas of responsibliity across my non-professional life and tasks and responsilbilities assocaited with each area.
Enter Notion A.I.
Notion suggests making categories or mindmaps. Both are decent suggestions, but not really anything inspriational or insightful. It is pretty generic advice, although if someone hadn’t done anything like what Notion AI suggests it might be helpful.
Thankfully, Notion AI provides a “Make Longer” option. This means that the ideas are expanded and provide some rationale for why it suggested these options:
Notion AI – Is it Worth $10 per Month?
Literally the day I started writing this, I got a chipper email from Notion letting me know that they really appreicate my contributions to this projects, AND that they will now start charging $10 per month to use it. Talk about poor copy writing. Thank you, and here’s your bill.
Now Notion AI has a ton of options and functionality. They have done a really slick job on this:
- Need to translate something?
- Need to organize your information?
- Need your grammar fixed? (Becuase we all LOVE having our grammar corrected.)
- Ask it to summarize information?
- Check. Check. Check.
It has a lot of options, and in this sense it’s continuing the Notion ideals of take a lot of disperate platforms, and reproduce a significant portion of their usefulness in the Notion workspace. I am not going to lie, I thought the Notion AI functionality was really nice to have, but…
At the end of the day, I’m not willing to spend $10 per month for Notion AI.
UNLESS I am working on a specific project / product / issue (which I’m not currently) then, absolutely. But as a general subscription service, no. I don’t have a compellign reason to do so yet. It doesn’t have a feature that I absolutly need, but two months ago I did.
I asked Notion AI to give me an outline for a Financial Operations Manual (FOM). And it gave me a good one with seven or so headings. I asked it to expand the sections of the FOM, and it increased that to ten sections. I cut two, added three more and saved myself probably 2-3 hours of research, and 1-2 hours of discractions. In that case, $10 for an estiamted 3-5 hours saved? Oh no question it would be worthwhile. Now Notion AI cannot write the documentation I need to create, but it can give me a great scaffolding to build upon.
My Conclusion on Notion AI
Overall, I like Notion a lot. I really like their Notion AI tool. But I’m not at a point in using Notion where I need this tool. I like the process of building and refining and simplifying (see my thoughts on Notion’s superpower here). There is significant value in that process.
But I could easily see where other power users would happily spend $10 per month, and I may join their number at some point in time in the future, but not today. I like that Notion has given each users 20 inquiries, but I think it’d be better to give 5-10 inquires a month. That way users can dabble in the Notion AI tool, and build experitise over time. Or gamify the process and allow them to build Notion AI inquiry credits by completing certain tasks, or providing user testing, troubleshooting new features and the like. Notion has a fantastic fanbase, and I think that figuring out a way to reward them for their engagment would be fantastic (I mean who wouldn’t love a Notion tshirt?).