Notion provides graceful fallback

Sometimes you need to fill in the gaps for the stuff that the agent is unable to do.

In such situations you can avoid all or nothing outcomes by using the Notion API.

Learn the limitations of agentic AI

This might sound like a strange reason to use an app, but agentic AI has a LOT of limitations that most AI companies will never tell you about, since they benefit a lot from the AI hype.

For example I mentioned one such limitation – Notion AI is not able to index text content inside databases, so doing AI search over the text content inside a large database is probably infeasible.

I personally think this is just a result of imposing a fixed budget and Notion needs to carefully ration its LLM API requests behind the scenes. Whatever the reason, the end result is that you cannot perform long running agentic tasks over the text data in a large database. 

But noticing the limitations is an important precursor to the next step.

Notion can avoid the all or nothing outcome of other agentic AI tools

If some task is too complex for an AI agent, you don’t have good workarounds in no code tools.

Notion avoids this problem by also allowing automation via its API.

Tip: where possible, use Python scripts (i.e. API automation) and avoid consuming the Notion AI agent resources so that you can use your daily quota for other tasks. 

The end result of using more automation will be 
a) a better understanding of how Notion works
b) more deterministic outcomes (AI Agents still produce strange nondeterministic errors on moderately complex tasks) 

API support out of the box

Quite often you will find that writing some automation code makes Notion AI work better.

This means even if the out of the box agentic AI in Notion is unable to perform some task, you might be able to fill in the gaps by writing some Python code.

This type of “graceful fallback” ensures you can complete building your agents.