The Honest ROI Story Behind Notion's AI Bet
Inside the quiet rewiring of expense reporting at Notion.
For most of the last year, the conversation around small-model orchestration has been louder than the evidence. That is starting to change.
The skeptical read is that we are watching a feature, not a platform. The optimistic read is that long context is exactly the kind of feature that becomes a platform when nobody is paying attention.
Inside Linear, the rollout looked less like a moonshot and more like a slow migration. A pilot, a champion, a quiet expansion, a budget line.
What DeepSeek actually shipped with Llama 4 is less a single capability and more a cluster of small, compounding improvements — the kind that only show up when you put a real workflow on top.
What Inflection actually shipped with Grok 4 is less a single capability and more a cluster of small, compounding improvements — the kind that only show up when you put a real workflow on top.
What Cohere actually shipped with Qwen 3 is less a single capability and more a cluster of small, compounding improvements — the kind that only show up when you put a real workflow on top.
Eval harnesses, once an afterthought, are becoming the most important piece of code in many AI projects. Shopify's team treats theirs the way an SRE team treats a runbook.
None of this guarantees a clean story. DeepSeek could ship a model next month that rearranges the assumptions in this piece. But the direction of travel, for now, is clear enough to plan around.