I’m a huge Notion nerd.

I use it for my startup as well as for personal use. It’s my second brain and contains all my knowledge reserves.

But sometimes, its also my first brain. Yes, really.

I have been outsourcing some tasks that I would normally do to Notion AI and so far its working great.

Well, after I figured out what it can do better than me.

The writing quality is not great yet- it tend to generate verbose and generic text sometimes, but there’s certain things it can do phenomenally well.

So, here are some of my favourite use cases for Notion AI.

My top five productivity hacks using Notion AI

Generating data tables and then converting them into databases

Let’s start with my favourite one.

Data!

Gathering accurate data from multiple sources can be tedious and time-consuming. And it’s never fun.

Enter, Notion AI, your one stop shop for generating data-based tables.

I used it to generate a comparison of VR headsets like here:

And also a tidy table of nutrients in common food items using the prompt below:

The cool thing is, Notion can convert these tables directly into database with one click! This is very convenient if you want to use this to integrate with others databases.

For example nutrient database can plug in to a recipe database to calculate the nutrient composition of your meal. Heath nuts, rejoice.

Do note that AI-generated data maybe inaccurate or outdated. For example, the headset price for the Oculus Quest had to be manually modified, as the AI picked up the release price.

Creating templates (really) fast

If you’re like me, you probably use templates in your Notion databases to reduce the effort needed for duplicating pages.

I’ve found Notion AI to be amazing at generating some standard templates.

Here’s an example for a result it gave when I prompted it to write a meeting minutes template:

All I did was convert it into two columns for better viewing (current meeting on the left, next on the right) and I was good to go.
This is a great starting point and often saves me a lot of time. If I don’t like it, I can just create a more specific prompt and try again.

Using context to fill templates

Sticking to templates, Notion AI benefits from its unique selling proposition (USP).
The integration.

How you may ask?

The AI can draw context from the page its in. The benefit is that you can use the same generic prompt in multiple pages and it will generate different data, based on context!

Here is an example from my Notion Book Library. I use AI to fill author bios.

Here you can see me use a generic prompt for an author in my library. The AI takes into context the page name and generates a pretty good response for Malcolm Gladwell!

Now if I use it for another author, you’d expect something specific to that author, right?

Notion AI says you’re right. This time I prompted it a second time to “make it longer”, and it generated pretty good text for Yuval Noah Harari too.

Same prompt, different context, different result. Pretty cool, right?
That’s why I embed AI prompt into my template, and just run them on every instance.
Works like a charm.

Analyzing large texts of data and summarizing

Notion AI is superb at summarizing text. I often use it to create a summary for long text so that I can decide whether to delve deeper or not.

Here is an example of what it can do.

This is a summary of Eric Migicovsky's Medium article on Pebble (sourced from here):

This is pretty good- especially the 2nd paragraph, which is right on the money.

I use Save To Notion, a plugin, to save articles such as these directly to my database. Then I can create quick summaries that saves me hours of reading time.

Additionally, I use an app called Glasp to get podcast scripts directly from YouTube, then synthesize them with Notion AI and decide whether to proceed with watching them.

Time is money!

Language translation

I miss Google Translate translations. They were entertaining.

Like this one, when I was checking on injury news for Japanese football player, Kikuchiyo Sailor.

On the left is the in-built Google Translate. On the right is the original text in Japanese from the website, and Notion AI’s translation for the next.

Notion AI (bottom) translated the injury update on Vissel Kobe’s Ryuho Kikuchi well, while Google Translate (top) altered his birth certificate.
And no, I was not searching for a player named Kikuchiyo Sailor. You couldn’t have seriously believed that!

Notion AI’s translation is near flawless- this is something Large Language Models excel at in general, but having it built into the app is pretty great!

If you want accuracy over entertainment, this might be the translation tool for you.

Conclusion

Notion’s inbuilt AI provides its biggest advantages due to its integrations! Database and Template generation, and in-context use of prompts can save duplication of effort.

Personally, I wish it were here twenty years ago when I was slogging through assignments doing painstaking research. Ok, that was 10 years ago, I am not that old.

Do keep in mind to fact check the AI- Notion will warn you that responses can be misleading. Do that, and it will save you hours every day.