Case study

Sam Finnegan-Dehn works in fundraising for a charity, but he moonlights as a math and philosophy tutor for university students from his home in London. Through this part-time business, he can leverage his degrees in philosophy and share his love of the subject with clients.

But meeting with students is only a fraction of the work it takes to be a good tutor. He also plans lessons and finds fresh reading materials, creates assignments, sends invoices, and keeps up with new research—all on top of his regular job. Given these demands, Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t have as much time as he’d like to grow his tutoring roster.

So he’s turned to AI for some help in managing the day-to-day aspects of his business. He says AI has taken on a secretarial role across all of his digital notebooks, where he jots down reminders about his clients’ progress and new readings to keep himself up-to-date. He describes using AI as kind of like having a second memory that helps him connect ideas he’s written down in various places.

While he has experimented with different tools like Claude and ChatGPT, he’s now landed on Notion AI because it integrates better with his tutoring notes, which live across his notebook tabs in the Notion app. Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t use AI to create teaching materials, but he does let Notion AI record meetings with his clients (after getting their consent), and then uses its automated summaries to refine his teaching strategy. For example, if he notices from the AI’s summary that it seems like a certain technique was not helping a student, he may change how he approaches the subject next time.

Beyond this, Notion AI also helps him with goal-setting, drafting lesson notes, invoicing, and generating and syncing social media posts. For goal-setting, for example, Finnegan-Dehn says he understands his long-term goals for his business but not always the concrete steps to build to them. He uses AI to help fill in these gaps. He starts by writing down a “North Star” goal—say, to have a certain number of clients by the end of the year. Next, he asks his AI to generate the steps that he needs to take to get there, given the profile he has built up in the app. Then, he can reflect on the results and choose which tasks to tackle first.