Almost a year after launching AI capabilities for its platform, Airtable is adding new features allowing businesses to use its AI on a larger scale. Not only that, but Airtable AI is now out of the beta stage and is available to all new and existing customers.
Airtable’s expanded capabilities now allow users to tap into AI enhancements within several of its individual features, but what businesses and enterprises will likely find the most useful is that Airtable AI will integrate with an individual organization’s data and workflows.
“Our vision is to make it really easy for a nontechnical person to build their own app,” says Airtable cofounder and CEO Howie Liu. “That was Airtable 1.0—with AI, we’re allowing that same person to build an app with AI capabilities.”
Among the new capabilities? Users can now take advantage of AI tools in conjunction with Airtable Automations—which are similar to “if-then” functions, performing a specific action when certain conditions are met. Liu says that AI can now perform tasks automatically when Automations’ conditions are met, saving users time and effort. AI can also help users write formulas by telling the platform what they want to do in natural language, rather than translating to code, and ask it to perform other tasks, such as summarizing conversations from Slack or other apps.
Liu says that after almost a year in beta, the company has “learned a lot, and will continue to add functionality” to Airtable AI. But now, the company is “opening the floodgates and releasing it to the world—we see it as being a much more accelerated effort to continue to build AI capabilities” for enterprises.
AI but ‘human-centric’
While tons of new AI tools or AI-enhanced products or services have hit the market over the past year or so, Liu says that Airtable AI sets itself apart by, again, fully integrating with a company’s existing tech stack, data, and workflows, and by being particularly user-friendly. That, he thinks, will help the companies that use it pull ahead of their competitors, as they allow workers to be more productive and efficient.
“We’re a very human-centric company—our vision is empowering more people to access the power of computing,” he says. “The way we’re thinking about AI is no different.”
Liu says he doesn’t necessarily see AI as a job killer but as a tool that can make workers better at their jobs. The full rollout of Airtable AI, and the resources that Airtable is spending on creating and improving its AI capabilities, is part of an overarching goal to augment work—not replace workers, he says. “Our goal is to make the humans in these companies more effective and more powerful with AI.”
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