🤖 Good employees have personality. So should your AI.
4 March 2026. Inside this issue:
Notion just launched AI assistants that work on their own, around the clock, without you asking
The problem: one AI trying to do everything at once does a mediocre job at all of it
The fix is simple - give each AI assistant a clear, specific brief for one job only
Anyone can do this today, no technical background needed
✍️ Essentials
On 24 February, Notion launched Custom Agents - AI assistants that run automatically in the background, handling tasks like answering team questions, sorting incoming requests or sending daily update summaries. You set them up once, and they run on their own. Notion itself now has more of these AI assistants running internally than it has human employees.
Think of it like hiring a contractor. A good brief for a copywriter looks nothing like a brief for an accountant. The same logic applies here. An AI helping you prepare presentations needs to know your style, your audience and your examples. An AI drafting client emails needs to know your tone for difficult conversations. Mixing those briefs together produces worse results for both jobs.
🐻 Bear’s take
This is not a technical problem - it is a clarity problem. The AI is only as focused as the instructions you give it. Most people who find AI “inconsistent” or “not quite right” are asking it to be too many things at once. A simple one-page brief per use case - what is the job, what is the tone, what sources should it use - changes the quality of the output immediately.
🚨 Bear in mind
Who is affected: anyone using AI tools for work and finding the results hit-or-miss.
Who benefits: people who take 30 minutes to write a focused brief for each task they regularly use AI for.
What to consider: pick the one task where AI disappoints you most often. Write down exactly what a good result looks like, what information it should use and what it should never do. Give that to the AI as its brief. The improvement will be immediate.