About the Vendor
Notion is an all-in-one productivity and collaboration platform that combines notes, databases, wikis, and project management. Its Custom Agents feature allows users to build AI-powered automation workflows in plain language, without requiring technical expertise.
About the Brand
Rakuten France is the French arm of the global Rakuten e-commerce marketplace. The company operates with a small, four-person AI team and embraces the Japanese principle of "shikumika" (systematization) to drive consistent, scalable processes across all departments.
Challenge
Rakuten France's four-person AI team couldn't scale automation across the entire company on their own. Previous no-code tools failed to stick—when the person who built a workflow moved to another role, the automation would break. The company needed a durable, democratized approach to automation that didn't create a central bottleneck, and where any employee, technical or not, could build and maintain workflows independently.
Solution
Rakuten France adopted Notion Custom Agents as the foundation for company-wide automation. AI Lead Sidney Golstein built a full internal platform within Notion, including: Shared Operating Procedures (SOPs) that every agent references; the Rakuten Agent Builder (a Custom Agent that creates other Custom Agents via plain-language chat); a Friendly Onboarder agent for new users; an Agent Registry database for discoverability; Agent Logs for transparency; and the Delicious Improver agent that reviews logs and proposes SOP updates. This created a self-learning, closed-loop system.
Execution
Sidney hosted workshops where every team built their first agent live. He created the Notion Agents Playground as a guided path for non-technical employees. For the product team, he built Plan Snitch, Run Snitch, and Release Snitch agents that scan backlog tickets nightly, and Sprint Lebowski, which posts tailored daily reports to each team's Slack channel. Adoption spread organically as teams saw colleagues benefiting and requested the same setup. The AI team's role shifted from building agents to maintaining the platform that enables others to build.
Results
Rakuten France now runs 80+ Custom Agents company-wide, the majority built by employees outside the AI team. Over 58,000 workflows have been automated. Some teams, including the product team, saw backlog health issues drop by 50%. Adoption spread organically after teams witnessed the daily Sprint Lebowski Slack reports, eliminating the need to "sell" the solution internally. The AI team transitioned from builders to platform enablers, and the system is self-improving through automated log review and SOP updates.