How my companies use AI

When you visit my office, you’ll be surprised by how few people work here. We run lean.

Gateway X oversees multiple businesses (and we’ll launch many more), but we only have 3 full-timers: me, our COO Nak, and our CTO Adam.

Our portfolio companies have bigger teams, but they run lean too.

AI helps us do that.

To give you a sense of how helpful AI can be, I asked our COO to show you how we use our favorite AI app: Notion AI.

Even experienced Notion users don’t fully appreciate Notion AI because they don’t realize just how much it can do.

Here’s some of what we do with it.

This email was written using Notion AI.

It started as a brain dump. Notion AI turned the ideas into an outline that made writing easier.

Of course, I edited, added, and made it my own. Notion AI doesn’t replace human writing, it just helps.

Notion AI turned my “brain dump” into an outline for this email:

Notion stores most of our company documents, including agreements, meeting notes, and transcripts.

Reading them can take a long time and isn’t necessary when all we need is the answer to a simple question, like “When did we agree to deliver the work?”

With Notion AI, we can “ask our documents” for the data we need.

This is how we ask Notion AI for summaries, next steps and other key data from long content:

Notion AI is the best AI writing assistant because it’s built into the tool we already use for writing: Notion.

If we’re stuck on what to say next, it’s annoying to have to keep copying and pasting text from a writing doc to a separate AI tool.

We can just tell Notion AI what we need and have it fill in the gaps.

This is how we use Notion AI to help us write:

We use Notion as a CRM. Often, before meetings, we’ll copy and paste LinkedIn profiles and other data about people we’re meeting into their CRM records and meeting notes.

The problem? Data is an ugly mess when pasted from the web. But with one request, Notion AI cleans it up and makes it easy to use on our calls.

Notion AI takes misformatted data and cleans it up for us, like this:

As a COO, one of the things that bothers me is disorder. For the whole team to be aligned on SOPs, agreements, etc, the docs need to be properly organized.

But people rush and often overlook organization.

Notion AI steps in and automatically labels and categorizes our documents, so everything is easy to find and access.

Notice how much more helpful the Notion AI titles are (middle column) than the human ones (left column):

Slack distraction can be a big productivity killer. When someone’s in flow, asking them “What company did we use for media buying?” can ruin their momentum.

We used to keep all our records in a cloud drive, but searching through files was tedious, so people kept asking each other for answers on Slack.

With Notion AI, there’s always a chat box available in the bottom right of the screen.

We can click and ask. The response we get isn’t a link to a file that we have to hunt through, it’s the answer we were looking for.

We can ask Notion AI questions and it’ll query our docs for the answer. Notice how it even links to its source material:

There’s more I could have written about. Notion AI can fill in databases, find action items in docs, create tables, and more.

But the best way to understand Notion AI’s power is to try it. Through their partnership with Jesse, Notion is giving organizations that subscribe to this newsletter 6 months of Notion for FREE, including unlimited Notion AI.

​Apply by clicking here.

When applying, select Bootstrapped Giants in the drop-down partner list and, when prompted, enter a partner code BGXNotion at the end of the form.

-nak