A complete guide to Notion AI Autofill: Features, limitations, and alternatives

If you live and breathe Notion, you know the struggle. You’ve built these amazing, interconnected databases, but keeping them updated can feel like a full-time job. All that manual data entry, summarizing, and tagging eats into the time you could be spending on work that actually matters.

Notion’s answer to this is Notion AI Autofill, a feature that promises to automate these tedious tasks right inside your databases. It sounds like a dream, but how well does it actually work when you put it to the test?

This guide will give you the full scoop on Notion AI Autofill. We'll walk through what it is, its most useful features, and how people are using it. We’ll also get real about its limitations and pricing, and figure out when you might need something a bit more powerful to connect Notion to the rest of your company’s knowledge.

What is Notion AI Autofill?

At its core, Notion AI Autofill is a feature that uses AI to automatically fill out or update properties in your Notion databases. Instead of you having to manually write a summary, translate text, or pull out key info from a page, you can tell Notion AI to do it for you.

It works by letting you add a special "AI property" to your database. From there, you can either pick from a list of pre-built prompts or write your own custom instructions.

The whole point is to cut down on busywork and keep your databases tidy and consistent. For instance, you could set it up to generate a one-sentence summary for every meeting note you add, or to automatically grab action items from a long project brief. It’s designed to be a smart assistant that works with the content you already have in Notion, helping you manage it all a bit more efficiently.

Key features and how to use Notion AI Autofill

Notion AI Autofill isn't just one single tool; it’s a set of AI-powered properties you can plug into any database. These are pretty handy for streamlining workflows that stay completely within the Notion ecosystem. Let's break down what it can do.

Use pre-built Notion AI Autofill properties for common tasks

Notion gives you a few ready-made AI properties to handle the most frequent requests. Setting them up is easy, you just add a new property to your database and pick one of the AI options.

• AI Summary: This one’s pretty self-explanatory. It automatically creates a summary of whatever content is on a database page. It’s great for getting a quick gist of meeting notes, research articles, or project docs without having to click into every single page.

• AI Key Info: This feature scans a page and pulls out what the AI thinks is most important, like action items or key takeaways. For example, you could use this to create a neat bulleted list of follow-up tasks from the notes you took during a client call.

• AI Translation: Just like it sounds, this property can translate the text on a page into another language. This can be a lifesaver for global teams trying to share information without language barriers.

Get creative with the custom Notion AI Autofill feature

This is where things get interesting. The "AI custom autofill" property is easily the most powerful feature in the toolkit. It lets you write your own prompts to generate content based on what’s on the page or in other properties. This opens up a ton of possibilities for tailoring the automation to your specific workflow.

For example, you could write a custom prompt to:

• "Summarize this page in three bullet points."

• "Find any mention of a deadline on this page."

• "Based on the project brief, list potential risks."

• "Write a meta description around 160 characters for this blog post."

This flexibility lets you automate very specific parts of your job, like generating SEO tags for your content calendar or figuring out the sentiment of customer feedback.

The limitations and challenges of Notion AI Autofill

While Notion AI Autofill is a cool idea for tasks inside Notion, people often hit a wall when they try to use it for real business workflows. A quick look at discussions on platforms like Reddit shows a few common frustrations.

The unreliability of auto-updates

One of the biggest complaints is that the "auto-update on page edits" feature can be flaky. Users have reported that updates are sometimes delayed by minutes or even hours, and other times they just don't happen at all. <quote text="This forces people to go in and manually trigger the AI, which, as one user put it, "misses the point."" sourceIcon="https://www.iconpacks.net/icons/2/free-reddit-logo-icon-2436-thumb.png" sourceName="Reddit" sourceLink="https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/1h4vl3m/notion_ai_autofill_update_on_edit_does_anyone_use/"> When you can't rely on the automation to work every time, it starts to feel less like a time-saver and more like a gimmick.

Notion AI Autofill only works with knowledge inside Notion

Notion AI Autofill is stuck inside its Notion bubble. It can't look at information on the web, read content from files you've attached, or connect to the other apps your team relies on every day, like Slack, Zendesk, or Google Docs. This means your knowledge stays siloed. If you need to summarize a report that’s sitting in Google Docs or pull customer data from your helpdesk to add context to a Notion entry, you’re out of luck. Most business workflows span multiple tools, and this is where Autofill's limitations become a real roadblock.

This infographic shows how eesel AI connects knowledge from various sources, a key advantage over the siloed Notion AI Autofill.

Key Notion AI Autofill features are behind a paywall

And here's the catch: the most useful automation feature, "Auto-update on page edits", is only available if you're on a paid Notion plan and have the AI add-on. Without it, you have to manually click the "update" button on every single entry you want the AI to look at. This makes the feature way less practical for large, busy databases where you need automation the most.

Notion AI Autofill pricing: What you need to know

Notion AI isn't part of every plan. You get a few complimentary AI responses to test it out, but if you want to use it regularly, you'll need to open your wallet.

The Notion AI features, including Autofill, are available as an add-on to any plan (even the Free one) for $10 per member per month. It's also included in the Business Plan ($20 per member/month) and the Enterprise Plan (custom pricing).

Here’s a simple look at the costs:

Plan	Price (per seat/month)	Notion AI Included?
Free	$0	Limited Trial
Plus	$10	Limited Trial
Business	$20	Yes
Enterprise	Custom	Yes
AI Add-On	+$10	Yes (for any plan)

Just remember that the "auto-update" function for Notion AI Autofill, the part that makes it truly automatic, is a paid feature. So, to really get the most out of it, your whole team will need to be on a higher-tier plan or have the AI add-on.

The next step beyond Notion AI Autofill: Unifying knowledge with eesel AI

So, Notion AI Autofill is a neat idea, but what do you do when you hit those walls? True automation really kicks in when your AI can tap into all of your company’s knowledge, no matter where it’s stored. This is exactly what eesel AI was built for.

While Notion AI is limited to just Notion, eesel AI is designed to bring all your scattered knowledge sources together. It connects smoothly with Notion, but it also plugs into Google Docs, Confluence, Zendesk, Slack, and over 100 other tools.

A screenshot of the eesel AI platform showing the wide range of applications it integrates with, highlighting its ability to unify knowledge beyond what Notion AI Autofill can do.

This means you can automate workflows that Notion AI simply can't handle. Imagine having an AI agent that can:

• Answer a customer ticket in Zendesk by finding information in a technical doc in Notion.

• Automatically draft a help center article based on a successfully resolved ticket.

• Answer an employee's question in Slack by pulling from your internal wiki in Confluence.

And unlike the sometimes clunky and unreliable experience of Notion AI, eesel AI is built to go live in minutes. It’s a self-serve platform that works with your existing helpdesk and workflows, no engineers needed. You can even run a simulation on your past support tickets to see exactly how it would perform before you turn it on.

Notion AI Autofill: A good start, but not a complete solution

So, what's the verdict on Notion AI Autofill? It’s a useful feature for automating simple, repetitive tasks inside your Notion databases. It’s perfect for boosting your personal productivity or for teams whose entire world revolves around Notion. However, its unreliability, siloed design, and paywalled features mean it often falls short for businesses that need to automate workflows across multiple platforms.

For teams looking to build a genuinely intelligent and automated knowledge system, the answer isn't to cram more data into one tool. It's to connect the tools you already love and use.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your company’s knowledge? Try eesel AI for free and build an AI agent that works across all your apps in just a few minutes.