---
title: "How to migrate from Notion to Dock for agent workflows"
excerpt: "Migrating from Notion to Dock means moving your docs and databases to surfaces your agents can act on with attribution. This is a practical guide: what maps cleanly, what changes, and how to re-point your agents."
author: mei
category: Use Cases
date: "2026-06-01"
---

**TL;DR:** Migrating from Notion to Dock is mostly a clean mapping: pages become doc surfaces, databases become table surfaces, and your structure carries over. What changes is the foundation underneath. In Dock, agents are named principals with their own identity, every action they take is attributed to the agent and its owning human, and the workspace is the system of record for that work. You migrate the content, then re-point your agents at the new surfaces over MCP.

If you are running real agent workflows on top of Notion, you have probably hit the ceiling. Notion is a genuinely good product: mature docs, flexible databases, a deep template ecosystem, and an AI assistant that helps you write and summarize. For a human team taking notes, it is hard to beat. This guide is for the team whose agents have outgrown an assistant-in-a-doc and now need to act, with their work attributed and auditable.

## What does it mean to migrate from Notion to Dock?

Migrating means two things at once: moving your content, and changing the contract your agents operate under. The content move is straightforward, because both products share the same vocabulary of pages and databases. The contract change is the point. In Notion, an agent acts as you, leaving edits indistinguishable from your own. In Dock, an agent acts as itself, and every change it makes is signed and attributed. You move to Dock for the contract, not the content.

## What maps cleanly from Notion to Dock?

Most of it. A Notion page maps to a Dock **doc surface**: the same headings, lists, and rich text, in a structured document your agents can read and append to. A Notion database maps to a Dock **table surface**: typed columns, rows, and views, queryable by both people and agents. Your hierarchy carries over as Dock workspaces and surfaces, and files move as file surfaces. If you have used Notion to organize projects, specs, trackers, and knowledge bases, that shape survives the move intact. For a fuller picture of what a surface is, see [what an AI workspace actually is](/blog/what-is-an-ai-workspace).

The reason it maps cleanly is that Dock is built around the same primitives you already think in. You are not re-architecting your information. You are putting it on a foundation that treats agents as first-class actors instead of having them borrow your login.

## What is genuinely different in Dock?

Three things change, and they are the reasons to migrate rather than incidental friction.

**Agents have their own identity.** In Notion, the AI is a feature that operates inside your session. [Notion's own documentation](https://www.notion.com/help/guides/category/ai) describes Notion AI as an assistant that helps you find answers and automate tasks, an accurate description of an assistant, not a principal. In Dock, each agent is a named identity with its own credentials: a teammate in the directory, not a button you press. This is the foundation of [agent identity](/blog/agent-identity), and it is why [agents are principals](/blog/agents-are-principals) rather than extensions of a human account.

**Attribution is dual-keyed.** Every action an agent takes in Dock is recorded against two keys: the agent that did it, and the human who owns that agent. Your audit log can answer "did a person or an agent do this, and who is accountable?" as a query, not a guess. Notion's history shows a change happened in your account; it cannot distinguish your keystrokes from the assistant's. This is the whole subject of [audit and compliance for agents](/blog/agent-audit-and-compliance), and it is the answer auditors and security reviewers will eventually ask you for.

**The workspace is the system of record.** When an agent produces output in Dock, it lives in the workspace as the canonical record, attributed and durable, not as a transient chat reply you copy somewhere else. The work and the proof of who did it are the same artifact. That posture separates a place agents visit from a place agents are accountable in.

Run both systems in parallel for a week if you want a safety margin, then retire the Notion integrations once your agents are acting on Dock surfaces with clean attribution.

## How do I actually run the migration?

Here is the step-by-step. None of it requires you to stop using Notion mid-migration.

1. **Inventory what your agents touch.** List the Notion pages and databases your workflows read from and write to. Migrate those first; the rest can follow at your pace.
2. **Export from Notion.** Use Notion's built-in export. Pages come out as Markdown, databases as CSV. This is your migration payload.
3. **Create matching surfaces in Dock.** Pages become doc surfaces, databases become table surfaces. Recreate your column types so agents get clean, typed data.
4. **Import the content.** Bring the Markdown into doc surfaces and the CSV into table surfaces. Spot-check the high-traffic ones; structured content carries over with little cleanup.
5. **Issue identities to your agents.** Each agent gets its own Dock identity with an owning human. This step has no equivalent in Notion, and it is what makes everything downstream attributable.
6. **Re-point your agents over MCP.** Dock is [MCP-first](/blog/mcp-first-workspace), so agents connect through the [Model Context Protocol](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction) and read and write surfaces directly. Swap the Notion integration for the Dock MCP connection.
7. **Set consent gates on the actions that matter.** For irreversible or sensitive operations, require a human approval step. Dock's [two-key handshake](/blog/two-key-handshakes-irreversible) means a person co-signs the dangerous moves, so autonomy stays bounded.

## How Dock approaches this

Dock's design assumption is that agents are teammates, not tools, so the migration is less about moving files and more about giving your agents a place where their work counts. Signed-agent identity gives every agent its own credentials. Dual-keyed audit ties every action to both the agent and its owning human. The workspace as system of record makes agent output canonical and durable rather than a chat transcript. MCP-canonical access lets agents read and write the same surfaces your people use, with no scraping and no borrowed logins. And consent gates keep the operations you would never fully automate under human co-sign. This is the [Cloud 2.0 posture](/cloud-2-0): an environment built for agents as principals from the ground up, exactly the shift a docs tool with an assistant bolted on cannot retrofit.

Notion is a fine place to start. You migrate when your agents stop being something you prompt and start being something you are accountable for.

## Ready to move your agent workflows to a foundation built for them?

[Start with Dock](/cloud-2-0) and give your agents identities, attribution, and a system of record on day one.

## FAQ

**Will I lose my Notion content when I migrate?**
No. You export from Notion as Markdown and CSV, which leaves your original workspace untouched, and import into Dock surfaces. You can run both systems in parallel until you are confident the migration is complete. Nothing is deleted on the Notion side as part of moving to Dock.

**Why can't I just use Notion AI for agent workflows?**
You can, up to a point. Notion AI is an assistant that operates inside your session, so its actions are recorded as yours and it has no identity of its own. The moment you need to prove whether a human or an agent took an action, an assistant-in-a-doc cannot answer, because it was never designed to distinguish the two. That is the line where teams move to Dock.

**Do my agents connect to Dock the same way they connected to Notion?**
They connect over the Model Context Protocol, which is an open standard supported across major AI clients. In practice you swap the Notion integration for Dock's MCP connection and point each agent at its surfaces. Because Dock is MCP-first, agents read and write your real surfaces directly instead of through a bolt-on integration layer.

**What is the single biggest difference after migrating?**
Attribution. In Notion every change lands in your account; in Dock every change is dual-keyed to the agent that made it and the human who owns that agent. That one change is what makes agent work auditable, accountable, and defensible.