Embrace AI, Like Notion Does

Every era is shaped by its miracle material. Steel forged the Gilded Age. Semiconductors switched on the Digital Age. Now AI has arrived as infinite minds. If history teaches us anything, those who master the material define the era.

— Ivan Zhao, Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds

Notion’s CEO Ivan Zhao wrote that intelligence will become an infinite resource — like steel and steam before it. Not just a tool, but a miracle material that reshapes everything built on top of it.

When I read this, something clicked. We always drive toward the future through the rearview mirror (Marshall McLuhan). Today’s AI chatbot is just a fancier search bar. Early factory owners swapped waterwheels for steam engines without redesigning anything — modest gains. The real revolution came when they realized they could build anywhere, at any scale.

We are still swapping waterwheels.

What makes Zhao’s essay more than a think piece is that Notion is actually acting on it:

• Notion AI now beats external AI + MCP combos in my daily workflow. It understands my workspace — pages, databases, connections — natively, in a way piped-in tools cannot match.
• 700+ AI agents already work alongside Notion’s 1,000 employees — handling meeting notes, IT requests, onboarding, status reports.
• They’re building for agents, not just humans. Zhao warns that software unable to be used by agents faces a dim future. Notion is positioning itself as infrastructure for both.

CEO writes the manifesto. Product team ships it. That alignment is rare — and powerful.

This changed how I think about my own work:

Consolidate context. AI is crippled when your knowledge is scattered across twenty tools. I moved most of my workflow into Notion — not for convenience, but to give AI a unified surface to actually help me.

Stop swapping waterwheels. If intelligence were truly infinite, how would you redesign your process from scratch?

Bet on builders who bet on AI. When the CEO writes Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds and the company ships agents at scale — they won’t be caught flat-footed.

Intelligence is becoming infinite. The question is whether we keep swapping waterwheels, or start building skyscrapers. 🏙️