Most growing businesses have one person everyone turns to. They know the deals, the customers and the history, and they answer every question because they care about the team getting it right.
At Baseten, that person was Anthony Katz, Baseten's first account executive. In a Notion customer story, Katz describes how 90% of his day was answering questions in Slack. He was the one who suggested a way out, mostly in jest: "Can we make a digital double of me?"
What Baseten did
The team built katzgpt, a Notion Custom Agent designed to sound like Katz, think like Katz and know what Katz knows. It connects through MCP to Salesforce, Gong, past Slack conversations and Notion, and it even mirrors his writing style. It lives in a Slack channel called Sales Phone A Friend.
As reported by Notion, the agent cut the response time on questions from an average of 30 minutes to about 20 seconds. President Dannie Herzberg describes what changed in the team: "We normalized asking for help. People do it five, ten more times a day now." The experiment led to more Custom Agents in recruiting, marketing and sales, including one that turns daily Slack conversations into knowledge base articles and suggests owners.
What it already gives the business
Baseten gave the whole company access to one expert's knowledge at any hour, and the expert got his time back. Herzberg puts it plainly: "I honestly don't know what Katz even spends his time on anymore."
Bradford Jordan, Head of Productivity and Enablement, names the feeling many experienced people share: "A lot of us have been Katz. We have more to give, but there's just not enough space and we don't have enough energy." The agent gave that energy somewhere better to go.
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
Katz started the idea himself, which is the healthiest way to build an assistant around a real person. A Company Brain would add the governance around it: a written record of his consent, a clear purpose for the agent, and limits on which conversations it may draw from.
It could also link the answers to the decisions behind them, so a new seller learns why a deal was shaped a certain way as well as how. That is our hypothesis, and Baseten may already be building in that direction.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
The owner should track how many questions reach the expert each week, how long answers take and how many get answered without the expert at all.
A buyer wants to see that a key person's know-how is available to the team, with a record of that person's consent, a defined purpose and a log of the sources the assistant uses. All figures here are reported by Notion as the vendor, so measure your own before and after.
The problem behind this case
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About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show Baseten staff. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 14, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside Baseten. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected].
Primary source: Vendor customer story, Notion, July 2026. Available at www.notion.com/customers/baseten.