Auto-generated description: A user interface displays a menu with options like Chat, Mail, and Calendar, with a red arrow emphasizing the Calendar option.

I posted a tweet (yes I refuse to call it anything else) the other day proposing the idea that OpenAI ought to acquire Notion. It took off like a rocket ship. I really didn’t expect it to be something that resonated with so many people, but after having spent some time thinking more deeply about it I can see why.

Google’s suite of productivity apps, namely Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs act as a moat for the company in the AI race. They not only give Google more data to work with, but they make the Gemini experience far more personal by giving users access to their personal information in their chats. It’s magical that you can ask Gemini to dive deep into your inbox or find something in a Google doc somewhere. OpenAI is missing this kind of moat. Yes, they have cultivated serious emotional relationships with users. But we’ve seen firsthand that it can evaporate overnight if they’re not careful, see the GPT 5 revolt from a large subset of users who had gotten too attached to GPT 4o. OpenAI needs more than an emotional relationship with its users, it needs to be indispensable.

At the moment, OpenAI is using Google’s MCP connectors to allow users to link up their Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs to ChatGPT. But they’re far from foolproof. While they do work well, they can’t do everything that Gemini can with these same services. I am a big proponent of MCP and think that it will likely win out as the right system for software developers to link their products up to all large language models without having to build separate tools for each one. But the pickings are a bit slim at the moment, unless you are a Zapier user I suppose.

OpenAI needs to build essential productivity tools directly into ChatGPT for a couple of reasons. They need to make the product even stickier and make sure that user sessions are as long as possible. Putting your inbox, calendar, and notes inside the ChatGPT experience will certainly do this. Users of ChatGPT would also get more personalization in their chats with direct access to their content. I’m not talking about just letting users reference things in chat, I’m talking about full scale app experiences within ChatGPT. Let me see my calendar, my inbox, and organize notes. The last major advantage this could bring is for OpenAI’s enterprise sales. They’d be able to pitch ChatGPT Enterprise as not just a tool for AI chat, but as their full stack productivity suite with mail, calendar, documents, and AI. The one caveat may be that the company would need to add support for more email services, currently Gmail and Google Calendar are the only supported options by Notion. But even then bringing a front end, cleaner, smarter mail experience for existing tools like Gmail directly into ChatGPT without Google building one would be huge.

OpenAI could build these experiences from scratch, but I think that would be a distraction. Notion is the obvious answer to solve this. Notion Mail, Notion Calendar, and Notion’s core experience are all so powerful already that there’s not a whole lot of work to do. Notion’s general ethos and aesthetic also blends perfectly with OpenAI’s. They’re both minimal, generally black and white, and focus on power rather than flourishes.

Notion was last valued at around $10 billion making it an easy target for OpenAI. They bought Jony Ive’s io products for $6 billion with no products in-market. They could afford it and I think the benefits would be enormous. I also don’t think that Microsoft would be nearly as big of an issue for this particular acquisition in the way that they mucked up the Windsurf acquisition.

On top of acquiring Notion and folding its suite of tools into the ChatGPT experience, I think that they need to refine the user experience to better support MCP, vibe coded apps, and other integrated experiences. Replace the GPT store with an app gallery to share your vibe coded experiences, much like Claude artifacts. Let those experiences get pinned to your sidebar and allow them to integrate with ChatGPT itself. You can even see other companies offering apps here for users to plug in to ChatGPT that use MCP connectors. The opportunities are endless. OpenAI might as well build an entire web-based operating system, something I built a concept for several years ago well before many of the things discussed in this story.

Long story short, OpenAI and Notion are a match made in heaven.