How We Run a 25-person Company on Four AI Agents

This event was produced in partnership with Notion. They had no input on the development of this article.

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Every runs six products, a media company, and a consultancy with around 25 people. At any given moment, each person has roughly 30 tasks on their to-do list. So how do they figure out which to work on first?

The team used to rely on Brandon Gell, Every’s COO, to run traffic control and coordinate the whole company, which required him to manually cross-reference launch calendars, company strategy documents, and task lists. Now he messages a Notion agent named Anton in Slack and gets a prioritized list for himself and others in seconds.

Anton is one of four custom agents Every has built with help from Notion AI over the past few months. Each one automates a different task that, without the agent, would require tedious logistical work to track and schedule. Each one draws on the same set of interconnected databases that the team already maintains.

At our first Custom Agents Camp, produced in partnership with Notion, Brandon and Every head of growth Austin Tedesco, walked more than 500 subscribers through four agents they’ve built, the databases underneath them, and how to create your own. Notion product designer Brian Levin also joined to share best practices from the Notion team.

Key takeaways

Describe the outcome, not the steps. Tell the AI what you want to accomplish and let it figure out the implementation. Over-prescribing (“Create a database, then add a relation, then filter by...”) tends to confuse the model.
Your Notion is your agent’s brain. Custom agents get powerful when they can query interconnected databases. Every’s agents work because strategy, calendar, tasks, people, and meeting notes all live in Notion and reference each other.
Don’t write the agent’s instructions yourself. Tell Notion AI what you want the agent to accomplish, and it will generate the instructions. Or use Claude Code with Notion’s API to build the whole thing from your terminal.

Anton: The prioritization agent

Every ships something almost every day, whether it’s a product update, an article, an event, a consulting deliverable, or a combination. Each launch gets its own set of tasks inside Notion, automatically populated from a template when the launch is added to the calendar.

The system works beautifully for tracking the full universe of tasks that exists. The problem is prioritization. With multiple launches overlapping each week, figuring out which of your 30 tasks matters this morning requires mentally weighing launch dates against company strategy against what your teammates are blocked on. Brandon used to be the human router for all of that. Now Anton does it.

The Anton agent, available through Notion or in Slack, helps Every team members keep track of their priorities. (Image courtesy of Katie Parrott.)

Anton also runs a daily broadcast to the whole company in Slack, summarizing what’s happening that week, and people can thread on the message to ask follow-up questions. “Having agents directly in Slack is where most of these conversations happen,” Brandon said.

A day in the life at Every, including what’s launching, when, and who owns it. (Image courtesy of Katie Parrott.)

The details:

Goal: Answer “What should I work on today?” for any team member, and post a daily company-wide priority summary to Slack.
Access: Company strategy document, OKRs database, unified calendar, tasks database that is linked to calendar entries, and a people database mapping each person to their team and role.
Outcome: A prioritized task list personalized to whoever’s asking. The agent can also answer team-level questions (“What are Cora‘s priorities this week?”) because it knows the organizational structure.