Welcome to the May 2026 edition of The Airtable Effect—a monthly roundup of what’s new, what’s inspiring, and what’s possible with Airtable. Whether you're an everyday builder, a certified pro, or just getting started, this newsletter is for you.
In each rendition of the newsletter, we’ll bring you:
- New product and program launches and updates
- The latest educational content from Airtable Academy
- Highlights from the Airtable Community
- Upcoming events you won’t want to miss
You can find The Airtable Effect every month:
- In your inbox (are you opted into marketing emails?)
- On LinkedIn (make sure to subscribe to this newsletter!)
- In the Airtable Community (check the Onboarding Resources section)
Let’s take a look back at what happened in Airtable last month.
🛠️ Build with Us at #BOSTechWeek
Boston builders, this one's for you. Airtable is hosting a hands-on AI Hackathon as part of Boston Tech Week, and we'd love for you to join.
Spend the afternoon with fellow builders, operators, and founders prototyping AI-powered workflows in Airtable. Teams will design solutions that automate decisions, streamline operations, and power new workflows across product, marketing, operations, and startups, then demo what they built to the group.
Whether you're an operator scaling internal tools, a founder building your stack from scratch, or an Airtable enthusiast looking to level up your AI skills, you'll leave with new ideas, practical applications, and fresh connections across the builder community.
📍 Part of #BOSTechWeek
🎨 AI-Generated Custom Elements: Now GA for Everyone
After a year in AI Labs, custom interface elements are generally available across every Airtable plan.
Describe what you need in plain language and Omni builds a fully custom element tailored to your workflow, with no templates or coding required. Since the beta, we've shipped multi-table support, version history, and the ability to revert and undo changes directly in Omni.
A few elements builders are already shipping:
- 🧱 3D asset review with annotated feedback
- 🎨 Interactive whiteboards connected to your base
- 🕸️ Network graphs that map record relationships
- 🌳 Dynamic, clickable org charts
Want full control? Edit the generated source in your browser, download it, or build from scratch with the Interface Extensions SDK (Teams, Business, and Enterprise Scale). Bonus: creating or updating AI-generated elements doesn't use AI credits.
🤖 Claude is where you think. Airtable is where you execute.
Connect Airtable to Claude and turn AI conversations into real projects, structured data, and automated workflows your team can build on.
Connect Airtable to Claude and turn AI conversations into real projects, structured data, and automated workflows your team can build on. With Airtable MCP, you're up and running in two clicks: no API keys, no configuration files.
Over 1,000 Community members joined our live walkthrough to see exactly how Claude and Airtable work together. Catch the recording →
Try any of the Claude prompts below to read, write, and analyze your Airtable bases:
- Identify which tasks in my project tracker are slipping
- Summarize what my team shipped this month
- Audit my base and suggest 5 improvements
No API keys. No configuration files. Connect to Claude and go →
🤖 Change Makers: Transforming Customer Feedback Management With Stefanie Lukner
Change Makers is our recurring series highlighting customer stories and builders making an incredible impact with Airtable.
This month's Change Maker is Dr. Stefanie Lukner, Global Head of Digital Products at Waterdrop, who replaced a broken Google Sheets workflow with a dedicated Airtable app that manages every negative NPS response end-to-end.
Before Airtable, Waterdrop's detractor management ran on fragile spreadsheets with broken formulas, no permission controls, and inconsistent handling across markets. Stefanie's team built an Airtable app that automates the full workflow using AI in three key ways:
- Survey submissions sync automatically into the base, with AI translating free-text feedback into English
- AI-driven categorization maps every comment to a primary complaint driver and attributes feedback to the right product using order data
- Cases route to Customer Success for structured follow-up, eliminating manual tracking entirely
The results: ~6 hours saved every week, every negative response captured and handled consistently in a single workflow, and clearer visibility into root causes for both Customer Success and Product teams. The full post also includes the exact AI prompt her team uses for issue categorization, ready to copy into your own apps.
Read the full Change Maker spotlight →
📅 Community Event Calendar
We’re always planning an exciting calendar of live events, user group hangouts, and office hours. Here’s what’s coming up:
May 7 | From Intake to Invoice: How One Audio Team Runs Everything in Airtable
Virtual · 11:00 am PT · We're pulling back the curtain on how one builder manages her entire audio engineering team inside Airtable. Register →
May 8 | Claude + Airtable for Marketing
Virtual · 12:00 pm PT · Curious about Claude + Airtable for marketing? In this session, we'll cover it live. Register →
May 12 | Airspace LA
In-person · Los Angeles, CA · 8:00 am PT · Airtable's biggest customer event of the year. Keynote, Buildathon, breakouts, and 300+ builders. Request your spot →
May 12 | Introducing Claude Connector for Airtable
Virtual · 10:00 am BST (EMEA) · Alex McDonnell (Director, Product Marketing) and Emily Houlihan (Product Manager) demo how to connect Claude and Airtable to turn ideas into execution. Register →
May 14 | The Art of the Ask: Airtable, Claude, & Prompting that Actually Works
Virtual · 11:00 am PST · This session breaks down what’s actually working when it comes to prompting agents to run your workflows. Register →
May 28 | Build with Airtable AI: Workflow Hackathon #BOSTechWeek
In-person · 1:00 pm EST · Join other Builders and founders using Airtable for an interactive Airtable AI Hackathon, where participants will design and prototype AI-powered workflows in Airtable. Register →
May 28 | Product Operations Summit Amsterdam
In-person · Amsterdam, NL · 8:00 am CEST · Exclusive CPO network covering the biggest challenges in scaling strategy, aligning teams, and driving AI-era innovation. Register →
June 2 | Build Agent-first Companies with Airtable #NYTechWeek
In-person · NYC · 3:00 - 6:00 pm EST · Join Airtable for a fireside chat and agent building challenge!
You'll get hands on with Hyperagent, Airtable's platform for building and deploying fleets of agents. Register →
June 4 | Airtable BuilderBase Chicago
In-person · Chicago, IL · 2:30 pm CT · Join us in Chicago to learn how to streamline your workflows through AI-powered operations. Register →
🧑🏫 Academy Updates
AI is essential for interface users and builders alike, so it should live where you're already learning.
This past month, we wove AI directly into our two core role-based learning paths, Introduction to Airtable and Builder Essentials, instead of keeping it siloed in standalone courses. You'll now find Field Agents, AI in automations, and AI elements in interfaces as native parts of the curriculum you're already taking.
🆕 New Launches
Using AI in Automations: A new lesson in the Introduction to Airtable Automation course showing how to add AI-powered steps to your automations — generate text, categorise records, and route workflows using AI actions. Explore the course →
AI in Airtable: A new lesson providing a bird's-eye view of AI features across the platform — from Field Agents to automations — giving builders a foundation for working with AI in Airtable. Explore the course →
What are Field Agents: A new lesson introducing Field Agents — AI-powered fields that watch for changes and automatically generate summaries, categories, and extracted data right in your records. Explore the course →
AI Elements in Interfaces: A new lesson covering how AI capabilities show up in Airtable's interface designer — helping builders understand where to surface AI-generated content in their apps. Explore the course →
AI at Work: A Beginner’s Guide: A new course introducing the mindset, vocabulary, and a concrete first step to start building real AI skills at work. Explore the course →
Orchestrating Agent Teams: A new course showing how to design, deploy, and manage custom agent teams — helping builders achieve their organizational goals. Explore the course →
🔁 Content Updates
The Agentic Deep Dive has been become the Field Agent Deep Dive. We’ve renamed this learning path and the courses within to make it easier for users to navigate courses by field agent capability and get their AI use-cases unlocked faster.
🚀 Product Launch Recap
Catch up on the latest features that launched this month—built to save you time, streamline workflows, and unlock new use cases.
✅ Custom Elements with Omni
Omni now generates fully custom interface elements from a plain-language prompt, so your team can build exactly the visualization or interaction your workflow needs. Go beyond standard Airtable components to create tailored experiences like 3D asset viewers, network graphs, org charts, and interactive whiteboards.
Use cases:
- Operations teams build custom warehouse layout views to track inventory placement in real time
- Marketing teams visualize campaign performance with branded dashboards tailored to each channel
- HR teams create interactive org charts that update automatically as headcount and reporting lines change
✅ Claude MCP Connector
Connect Airtable to Claude and ask about your data in plain language without leaving the conversation. Claude searches your bases, looks up records, browses your interfaces, and helps you take action on what it finds, bringing your operational data directly into the AI tools your team already uses.
Use cases:
- Customer success managers pull account health details and draft renewal outreach in a single Claude thread
- Product teams query roadmap bases to summarize shipped features for stakeholder updates
- Finance teams ask Claude to surface budget line items and flag variances against quarterly targets
✅ Admin Panel UX Improvements
The admin panel got a major refresh focused on speed and ease of navigation, including resizable sidesheets, paginated browsing, faster cached data on the Users page, and immediate search availability during load. A new Library section groups Managed Apps, Components, Data Sets, and HyperDB together, making it faster for admins to govern large workspaces.
Use cases:
- IT admins search and filter thousands of users while data loads in the background
- Workspace owners audit Managed Apps and Components from a single Library view during quarterly access reviews
- Security teams paginate through user lists and export filtered results for compliance reporting
✅ Skills for Airtable MCP
Skills give your AI agent the context it needs to work more accurately with Airtable. The airtable-overview skill teaches your agent how bases, tables, and fields relate, while the airtable-filters skill sharpens record retrieval so queries return the right results more reliably.
Use cases:
- Operations teams deploy agents that pull accurate cross-table reports without manual prompt engineering
- Customer success agents retrieve filtered account records to answer support questions in seconds
- Product teams power internal copilots that reason over complex base structures with fewer errors
View “What’s new in Airtable” →
Did you find the Airtable Effect helpful? Any suggestions or recommendations for future editions? Want to learn more about the Airtable Academy and/or Community programs?
Or do you want to be featured in an upcoming rendition? Reach out on LinkedIn and/or on the Airtable Community (@kev) and show us what you've built in Airtable!