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How Braintrust saves hours a day with Custom Agents in Notion
Before the team logs on, the busywork starts
At 5 a.m., Braintrust’s VP of Marketing Morgane Palomares is already up researching recent competitor launches. By 9 a.m., she’s 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: “In the age of AI, you should just refuse to do repetitive work.” 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 solution—hiring more people to handle coordination—would 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 shouldn’t
Braintrust’s 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 Agents—or her “buddies,” as she calls them—that 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 it’s 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 “top logos” 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, she’d need contractors or additional headcount to cover these manual workflows. “When you think that our buddies are doing work that, before, entire humans on the team had to do, you quickly realize we’re saving hours a day,” 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 can’t 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 we’re 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 aren’t operating in a vacuum; they’re reading and writing back into the same system their teams already rely on every day—updating 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 Braintrust’s 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 “infrastructure for intelligence.” This foundation means Custom Agents aren’t completing isolated tasks—they’re working with a full picture of what’s happening across the company.
This context makes Notion AI indispensable. Ankur uses it as his “primary entry point to what’s happening in the organization,” 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. Braintrust’s sales one-pagers quietly update themselves. Custom Agents scan competitor changelogs, enrich customer databases, and surface opportunities—all 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. It’s the basis for their product, after all—they monitor performance scores and evaluate AI systems every day. They chose Notion specifically because their own data validates Notion AI’s quality as top-tier. “Because we work with the Notion AI team, we know they’re evaluating and updating so much—it’s why Notion’s Enterprise Search is one of the best,” says Morgane.
For Braintrust, this is the future of AI-supported work that they’re helping companies build every day. Custom Agents have completely redefined how they get work done—Notion 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 they’re evaluating and updating so much—it’s why Notion’s Enterprise Search is one of the best.