AI Skills in Notion

Say, you’ve trained boxing for many years and you stumble upon a street fight one night. You immediately invoke your boxing skills to protect your friend.

Similarly, Notion AI has skills: different abilities invoked when suitable. You create those skills and make them available to Notion AI.

For example, you ask Notion AI to review and correct an essay you’ve written. To do so, instead of starting from scratch or following random methods, Notion AI can automatically use the Review skill (in this case, a tool call in software speak) you carefully created to follow your preferred approach of hiding insecurities in your writing (joking).

You can also select text or a block on any Notion page and quickly invoke a skill. For example, you select a paragraph in your essay and invoke the “Analyst” skill to get a detailed, customized report on all the hidden psychological knots behind each word. This enables precise and fast interactions with AI, rather than chat-based, verbose conversations.

For a visual overview of how to create and use AI Skills in Notion, watch the video.

What’s the difference between Notion AI Skills and Instructions?#

Instructions can be defined as the personality: the preferences and values that shape everything you do. Skills are context-dependent abilities you invoke at the right moment, like your boxing skills in a fight.

In Notion, both are pages. Skills can be used automatically by Notion AI Agent and Custom Agents, while instructions are set by you in the Notion AI Agent customization settings.

There are ongoing improvements to this feature, so what you currently see in Notion may differ from what I show in the video and screenshots. The concepts are the same though, and that’s what matters.

Take the task you re-explain to AI most often, and turn your explanation into a skill. Next time, invoke it instead of typing it.

Skills give Notion AI your methods and standards encoded once and invoked in the right context whenever needed.

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