Airtable work platform launches AI tools to make you more productive

Artificial intelligence is powering tools that can help you write blog posts, develop programming scripts, and even do your taxes. And if you work at one of the hundreds of thousands of businesses that utilize the popular workflow platform Airtable, AI may soon help you supercharge your productivity.

Airtable is launching Airtable AI, which will use AI capabilities to help teams build, customize, and deploy AI-powered apps and processes in a quick and easy fashion. The San Francisco-based company, which competes with platforms such as Trello or Asana, has separated itself from the pack by allowing non-coders and programmers to streamline operations and easily create their own applications within Airtable itself.

Following a series of upgrades last October, Airtable’s newest implementations will bring AI to the white-collar masses, with the aim of making it more useful to those who have little or no experience with the rapidly emerging technology.

“We think of Airtable as a ‘Lego kit,’” says Howie Liu, Airtable’s cofounder and CEO, “and we think that AI should be another Lego piece. We’re giving our customers the ability to play around with AI.” Liu says that part of the company’s strategy is finding ways to give the typical worker—namely, those without programming or in-depth tech skills—a taste of what it’s like to use AI to augment their productivity. 

That’s one of the big promises of generative AI, after all: potentially saving the average worker hours of time by cutting down on the number of resources required to knock out projects on their to-do lists.

While AI may appear to be suddenly everywhere since the release of OpenAI’s massively popular ChatGPT in November, Liu says Airtable had already been giving serious thought and consideration as to how to mesh its existing platform with new AI features. It’s only been within the past year that the company ramped up production related to Airtable AI, he says, but by using the product’s new AI features, in-house, it’s already showing immense promise.

What can Airtable AI do?

An example of how the new features work includes developing drafts of copy for social media. Users can input a prompt, including several variables, and the system will produce a series of drafts based on the inputs, similar to ChatGPT. But that’s merely one of many AI-backed capabilities that Airtable will incorporate, and going forward, Liu says the possibilities and potential efficiencies created by Airtable AI will be hard to ignore for its users.

“It’s capable of coming up with pretty good ideas, and if it’s useful even for a fraction of the time—and saves a product manager hours of work—then [using it] is worth it,” he says. “It’s so easy to build an app using the AI capability, and it doesn’t need to be profound and currently upend your job.”

He adds that Airtable AI will become a part of the company’s core product and that Airtable has not made any decisions as to any pricing changes for its throngs of customers—a list that includes companies such as Nike, Amazon, Spotify, IBM, and even Fast Company.

Of course, Airtable is far from the only large company to be rolling out AI-backed products and services. To name just a few examples: Intuit is experimenting with AI in its TurboTax product, Microsoft is using it in conjunction with its Bing search engine, and EdTech company Khan Academy is even piloting new AI tools to act like tutors.

All of this is happening with artificial intelligence now on the radar of the White House and government regulators, and as some tech workers voice concerns about the technology’s explosive growth and adoption, and with economists closely watching its potential to disrupt entire industries.

Though it seems like it’s all happening extremely fast, Liu says that what we’re seeing now in relation to AI has actually been simmering for years and that the hype around AI—unlike innovations like the metaverse, perhaps—is actually justified. 

“Unlike some other tech, where the hype has preceded the substance, the substance [around AI] has been developing behind closed doors for many years,” says Liu. “Our whole premise is to make people more productive with software, and our bet is that AI can be helpful to humans,” he adds. “We’ve found immediate value already.”