The latest breakthrough in AI for businesses seems to be a seemingly simple yet crucial application: swiftly locating information amidst the chaos of files, folders, attachments, and various enterprise software applications that define today's knowledge work. Notion is at the forefront of this innovation with its new feature, Q&A. CEO Ivan Zhao describes it as an all-knowing AI executive assistant, proficient in quickly retrieving any information stored within Notion.
Accessible to all Notion users, whether individual or corporate, Q&A is priced between $8 and $10 per person monthly. This tool shares similarities with Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Duet AI, Dropbox Dash, and Google’s NotebookLM. The challenge it addresses is straightforward yet complex for AI: effective information retrieval.
Notion's Q&A blends search engine capabilities with chatbot intelligence. It can find specific information like the office Wi-Fi password or locate broader categories like onboarding templates, provided the data is within Notion. To ensure reliability, all responses from Q&A are linked to Notion pages, preventing the creation of false information.
The tool also handles more ambiguous queries. In a demonstration, Zhao used it to find articles by a specific author and inquire about companies not recently covered. However, the tool's effectiveness is tied to the data it can access. Notion is exploring ways to integrate more data sources, acknowledging the challenge in doing so.