Notion Says Most Firms Still Early in AI Adoption at DMI 2027

Notion marketing head Chae Ji-seon presented Notion's AI transformation survey data and Notion Korea's agent-based inbound lead workflow at the Digital Marketing Insight 2027 (DMI 2027) conference, held at El Tower in Yangjae-dong, Seoul, according to tech42.co.kr. The talk was titled "What is different about organizations where AI works? How AI agents change the way marketing teams work."

The conference was held for the eighth time under the theme "AI rewrites everything in business." Notion's survey of 6,118 people across 10 global markets including Korea, conducted from March to May this year, found that 57% of respondents were at stage 1 of the company's four-stage AI transformation model, 31% at stage 2, 10% at stage 3 and 2% at stage 4. The four stages are thought partner, assistant, team member and system.

The survey covered 2,039 leaders who decide AI adoption and 4,079 practitioners who had used AI chat tools at work in the past month. Korea's share of respondents at stages 3 and 4 was 16%, second after Singapore at 21% and alongside German-speaking markets near the top.

Leaders and practitioners diverge

Perceptions of progress differed sharply between the two groups. Among leaders, 49% said they were very confident in their organization's AI capability, versus 23% of practitioners. 60% of leaders versus 36% of practitioners said AI agent readiness was at a certain level or higher, and 26% of leaders versus about 5% of practitioners said their organization was at stage 3 or above.

In marketing, brand and PR roles, 12% of respondents were at the advanced stage, below IT managers at 24%, executives at 23% and product management at 15%. Advanced-stage respondents more often cited the ability to do work they could not do before, up to 20% from 10%; automation of repetitive tasks, 36% from 18%; and connecting and passing work between tools, 26% from 11%. They also reported more integration of AI with existing work systems (55% versus 37%), governance and oversight systems (42% versus 26%) and metric-based measurement (37% versus 22%).

Notion Korea redesigned its inbound lead management process with five AI agents, cutting workflow steps from 24 across six tools (Notion, Salesforce, Slack, Gmail, Outreach and Rattle) to 6 and reducing time from about 100 minutes to 17 minutes, an 83% reduction. Previously the team moved through six tools across 24 steps, with staff checking information and writing follow-up emails or meeting notes.