Notion

The challenge: Keeping data insights accessible as Notion grew

As Notion introduced its AI features, the team and product grew — a lot. More teammates, more product surface areas, more launches, and a lot more questions that needed answers yesterday. The data team balanced high-impact work (like forecasting) with the necessary grind of table hunts, documentation, and constant requests — a strategic call to protect quality and keep the business moving.

Even with smart prioritization, the volume created a bottleneck and a lot of context switching. Hex helped ease that load by speeding up core workflows and expanding access to trusted data with AI without sacrificing governance.

The solution: The Notebook Agent is a force multiplier for data teams

Today, Hex is the data tool of choice for the Notion Data Science team and their business colleagues (amidst a data stack that includes Snowflake, Amplitude, Fivetran, Spark, and Tableau). Most employees at Notion get immediate access to Hex, making it the frontline tool for cross-functional stakeholders for both exploratory and complex data science workflows across the Sales, CX, Product, Operations, Finance, and Sales organizations.

"Hex’s Notebook Agent accelerates our data exploration while maintaining security and access controls built into Hex.” - Aks Nemana, Data Scientist

Accelerating the build of complex customer analysis with the Notebook Agent

One of the most advanced ways that Hex is helping the Data team is with building classification models that predict customer expansion, churn, and renewal.

Data Scientist, Aks Nemana, is using Hex’s Notebook Agent as a partner in a hugely complex data project. The agent takes on the tedious work — generating documentation, bulk refactoring across notebooks, and optimizing reporting to automate weekly analyses. It also helps him bridges domain gaps. Notion's Data Scientists are embedded across business units, each with their own tables and metrics. When Aks needs product data outside his usual scope, the agent pulled from tables and analyses other teams built — without handoffs or additional coordination.

With the Notebook Agent, Aks has been able to ship customer trend reporting much faster.

"Hex's Notebook Agent can see our Snowflake tables, reference other analyses, and investigate issues on the spot.” Aks Nemana, Senior Data Scientist

Helping non-data team members find the metrics they need

At Notion, 86% of recent Notebook Agent users aren't Data Scientists — they're Engineers, Operations, Finance, CX, Sales and Product Managers exploring data independently. These colleagues often know what question they need answered but don't know how to build or retrieve the metric in Snowflake's vast table structure. The Notebook Agent acts as a data discovery layer. When a Product Manager needs metrics on a newly launched or existing feature, they can ask the agent to identify relevant tables and suggest starting queries. The Notebook Agent is so popular among users that the agent has been used close to 6,500 times over the past six months. With so many users having access to Hex, Notion leverages OAuth to drive security and compliance, ensuring that every user can access the right level of data.

Running advanced analytics where the data lives in Snowflake

Notion’s Data Scientists are building machine learning workflows and wanted those insights to show up in the product — starting with improving search.

Using Hex with Snowpark, they can run SQL and Python directly in Snowflake, so they’re transforming large datasets where the data already lives instead of moving it around. And because Hex plugs into Snowflake so cleanly, it has become a single place where both power users and more occasional contributors can do serious work without needing a separate toolchain.

Empowering GTM teams with data apps, built with Notebook Agent

Notion is using Hex as a platform for internal web apps that show insights based on internal data combined with external research. Because of this, the GTM team has become some of Hex’s biggest users within the company.

The CX team uses data apps in Hex as a UI to pull customer details, while the Sales team uses an app that combines Salesforce and Snowflake data to create detailed research reports on prospective customers. This helps the Data team share data in a way that’s easily accessible and summarized, reducing hours of manual research and documentation for each Sales and Customer Success team members. These reports have become some of the most accessed reports across the company.

"We are using the Notebook Agent a lot because we're not software engineers. The Agent helps us understand the nuances of working with Open AI and Notion’s APIs." Aks Nemana, Data Scientist

The impact: Distributing more insights by embracing AI-assisted workflows

With the launch of the Notebook Agent, Notion's Data team is doing more with the same resources:

• 86% of recent agent users were non-Data Scientists. Cross-functional stakeholders can now explore data on their own.

• The Data team saves hours of manual prep work each week with automated insights through data apps, enabling the Data team to scale insights without scaling headcount.

• The Data team's data apps in Hex, like the Account Research Data App, have become one of the most accessed reports across the company.

The bigger shift? With Hex, Notion’s data team is going from reactive to proactive. The Data team isn't just answering questions faster, they're building infrastructure that allows the cross-functional teams to answer their own questions. With agent observability in the Context Studio, the Data team can now make more informed decisions and build structure to improve the Notebook Agent use.

By pairing the Notebook Agent and Threads with their semantic layer, they’re working toward self-service without losing governance. They’re also exploring integrations with Notion and Slack to bring insights to where teams already work — and reduce the need for an on-call rotation.

Aks Nemana, Data Scientist and Abhishek Modi, AI Software Engineer at Notion

Learn how Notion's Head of Data uses data to drive product craft.