Notion helps Cohere save 7+ hours per week for faster shipping velocity

Founded by former Google Brain researchers and backed by Nvidia, Cohere is a leading enterprise AI company building frontier LLMs and AI solutions. These LLMs serve as the digital brains behind advanced AI, capable of understanding, summarizing, and generating content in many languages, powering enterprise search, and automating tasks with multi-step tool use . Cohere provides these models to other companies, including Notion, to easily integrate this technology into their applications. Developing and bringing this kind of highly technical product to market requires lots of different specialized tools.

Before everyone at the company started using Notion, key project information was scattered across these various applications. That fragmentation not only made it harder to find essential information but also created communication barriers between teams. Each department, equipped with its specialized tools, spoke a distinct technical language: developers communicated through code repositories, product managers via feature roadmaps, and GTM teams in pitch decks. At times, it felt like a modern-day Tower of Babel for Cohere’s teams that resulted in extra meetings on top of Slack pings and email threads just to align everyone’s understanding.

“A Google doc or slides might be where something gets drafted but it can only provide snapshots of information,” explains Staff Security Engineer Ads Dawson. “Since Notion was already set up as our company’s wiki, it started to become a source of truth for similarly connecting all the ideas and information from all our different tools in one place everyone at the company could all follow.”

Cohere typically has between 30 and 40 people working on a single project, across multiple functions and time zones. Product managers orchestrate collaboration across these cross-functional teams, using Notion as their command center to seamlessly connect high-level strategy with day-to-day execution. By centralizing critical information and workflows in one place, PMs can effectively guide teams toward shared goals while maintaining clarity and momentum throughout the development process.

Cohere's product team centralizes their entire product roadmap planning in Notion, connecting all aspects of product development from customer feedback and market research to product requirement documents and retrospectives. Team templates standardize processes, enabling quick setup of new projects with pre-defined structures. Once a project gets kicked off, synced blocks ensures any changes to critical information in one place gets automatically updated everywhere else in their Notion workspace. This is a life-saver for spec changes, eliminating the need for manual updates across multiple documents.

This integrated approach in Notion streamlines information sharing while providing teams with a clear, real-time view of product development progress. "Having everything visible to everyone at the company makes it so much easier to discover what other teams are working on and find natural points of connection," explains Product Manager Ana Cismaru.

As a result, the product team can make informed decisions without hours spent trying to find this information or in meetings discussing it, setting the stage for seamless handoffs to the engineering team, who rely on this centralized information to execute on product vision efficiently.

Building on the product team's centralized approach, Cohere's engineering team only has to look in one place to find the information they need, reducing context-switching and minimizing miscommunication. "Having a single hub for every project has become our source of truth and eliminates the confusion of scattered information across multiple tools,” says Staff Security Engineer Ads Dawson.

Engineers benefit from Notion's versatile canvas for visualizing and communicating complex ideas. Technical concepts come to life through a mix of text, code snippets, diagrams, and embedded media—making them clearer to both technical and non-technical team members. With feedback captured in the same space, incorporating suggestions and reaching decisions becomes seamless.

Notion also functions as a central knowledge hub for Cohere's engineering best practices. Engineers document, share, and evolve their best practices in a centralized, searchable hub within their teamspace. This ensures everyone works from the most up-to-date knowledge base, effectively mitigating technical debt and promoting consistency across projects.

With a tighter integration between engineering and other cross-functional teams in Notion, Cohere not only accelerates development cycles but also fosters a more collaborative environment where ideas can be shared, iterated upon, and implemented more efficiently.

Too many companies have a tech stack full of solutions only used by a handful of people. But a majority of Cohere's 400+ (and growing) employees around the world use Notion daily. Everyone creates in Notion and integrates information from their specialized tools. This widespread adoption has not only improved collaboration but also keeps costs from other tools down because Cohere doesn’t have to purchase licenses for everyone.

Notion has become deeply ingrained into workflows at Cohere, creating a culture of documentation that helps everyone stay on the same page without the need for regular meetings and updates. Teams no longer have to search through different applications or wait on the answers they need to get their work done— they find everything in Notion. This all translates to an estimated average of over 7 hours save per week for Cohere’s employees based on Notion’s research calculations. Instead of searching and sharing updates on their work, everyone at Cohere can focus on exchanging ideas and feedback to create better AI products even faster.