Customer Story
How Braintrust saves hours a day with Custom Agents in Notion
As Braintrust grew, busywork grew with it. They built Custom Agents in Notionâs AI workspace to automate competitor research, sales prep, and customer evidenceâsaving their teams hours a day before anyone logs on and keeping the latest context flowing automatically.
Before the team logs on, the busywork starts
At 5 a.m., Braintrustâs VP of Marketing Morgane Palomares is already up researching recent competitor launches. By 9 a.m., sheâs combed through Gong call transcripts for specific keywords, cross-checked a Slack channel for new customer deals, and manually rewritten a sales one-pager. All before anyone on her team even logged on. The manual work never stops.
Founder and CEO Ankur Goyal has a golden rule: âIn the age of AI, you should just refuse to do repetitive work.â For Braintrust, the AI observability platform trusted by Notion, Stripe, and Replit, this philosophy runs deep.
But as Braintrust grew, typical startup patterns emerged anyway. Marketing manually tracked competitor moves and customer logos. Sales needed hours of prep to understand context before calls. Customer support fielded the same questions repeatedly.
The traditional solutionâhiring more people to handle coordinationâwould slow them down and dilute the builder-heavy culture they were protecting. More meetings and more tools would create the exact overhead problem AI is supposed to solve.
In the age of AI, you should just refuse to do repetitive work.

Custom Agents do the work humans shouldnât
Braintrustâs answer was Custom Agents. They built a handful of specialized AI teammates to monitor multiple sources, synthesize information, route tasks, and communicate results. They run entire multi-step workflows without anyone needing to manually intervene.
For example, Morgane built three Custom Agentsâor her âbuddies,â as she calls themâthat have transformed how her team gets work done:
Competitive Intelligence Buddy monitors all competitor changelogs and scans Gong call transcripts for competitive keywords, then updates sales one-pagers in Notion every morning at 9 a.m. When sales reps download PDFs, they know itâs the most current information. No one on marketing needs to manually compile updates anymore.
Customer Evidence Buddy listens to the Slack channel where sales shares closed deals and logo-usage rights. It then automatically updates a customer-evidence database, sends a weekly recap to marketing, and delivers a curated âtop logosâ list directly to the CEO for speaking prep. A workflow that previously needed constant coordination from sales, marketing, and leadership is now covered by one Custom Agent.
Usage-Based Buddy tracks self-serve customers to see when they hit usage thresholds, surfaces the accounts most likely to convert to enterprise, and alerts sales to prioritize outreach.
Morgane says without Custom Agents, sheâd need contractors or additional headcount to cover these manual workflows. âWhen you think that our buddies are doing work that, before, entire humans on the team had to do, you quickly realize weâre saving hours a day,â she says.
But the real value beyond time saved is what people can do instead. Ankur says there are two problems with busywork: It subtracts time for strategic thinking, and it drains people so they canât do their best work. Sales teams now show up to meetings with the complete context they need without having to waste time manually researching themselves.
When you think that our buddies are doing work that, before, entire humans on the team had to do, you quickly realize weâre saving hours a day.

The foundation that makes Custom Agents work
Custom Agents need two things to be effective: Complete organizational context, and a home where all work actually lives. For Braintrust, Notion is both. Their agents arenât operating in a vacuum; theyâre reading and writing back into the same system their teams already rely on every dayâupdating sales one-pagers, enriching a database of customer-logo rights, and pushing weekly recaps to the people who need to act on them.
All of Braintrustâs docs, meeting notes, projects, and decisions flow through Notion. With connectors to tools like Slack and Google Drive, Notion AI can access critical information wherever it lives, creating what Braintrust calls their âinfrastructure for intelligence.â This foundation means Custom Agents arenât completing isolated tasksâtheyâre working with a full picture of whatâs happening across the company.
This context makes Notion AI indispensable. Ankur uses it as his âprimary entry point to whatâs happening in the organization,â checking project statuses, understanding customer updates, and catching up on Slack discussions without interrupting anyone. The company adopted a simple triage principle: Questions go to AI first, not into Slack messages. Customer support, for example, now asks Notion AI before asking engineers.
Building AI quality together
Now, every morning at 9 a.m. Braintrustâs sales one-pagers quietly update themselves. Custom Agents scan competitor changelogs, enrich customer databases, and surface opportunitiesâall before anyone on the team opens their laptop.
As an AI observability platform, Braintrust has unique visibility into which companies build the highest-quality AI. Itâs the basis for their product, after allâthey monitor performance scores and evaluate AI systems every day. They chose Notion specifically because their own data validates Notion AIâs quality as top-tier. âBecause we work with the Notion AI team, we know theyâre evaluating and updating so muchâitâs why Notionâs Enterprise Search is one of the best,â says Morgane.
For Braintrust, this is the future of AI-supported work that theyâre helping companies build every day. Custom Agents have completely redefined how they get work doneâNotion AI handles coordination and synthesis, and their teams can focus on thinking, building, and delivering exceptional experiences to customers.
Because we work with the Notion AI team, we know theyâre evaluating and updating so muchâitâs why Notionâs Enterprise Search is one of the best.



