Happy New Year! Welcome to the January 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 here, in the Onboarding Resources section!)
Let’s take a look back at what happened in Airtable last month.
🎬 The Community Creator Challenge and Your Chance to Win $10K
We’ve launched our first ever Community Creator Challenge, a social media video contest to source short, creator-made ads for use across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other paid social channels. We want to see our amazing community shine and show how you use Airtable to solve a real problem or run a real workflow.
If your video is selected and used in one of our paid campaigns, you’ll earn a $200 cash prize. Then, at the end of the campaign period, the single best-performing video, measured by click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate to a new product signups during the campaign period, will take home the $10,000 grand prize.
The submission window for contest entries is open NOW through January 30th. All the details, including entry form and official contest rules, are live in the Community
Learn more (+submit your video) here →
🎥 Airtable 2026: The New Playbook on January 22
Airtable is hosting a virtual event to showcase how you should be building workflows with AI in 2026. Whether you’re new to building with AI or already scaling Airtable workflows across your team, The New Airtable Playbook will help you level up.
What you’ll get:
- A short conversation with Airtable’s CTO, David Azose, on what’s next for Airtable
- Three real-life playbooks for AI you can pull from for your own use cases
- Actionable examples and advice from customers and industry experts
Attendees should also check out the Airtable Community’s “Battle of the Builders” breakout session featuring 5 Airtable customer demos, and you get to help pick the winner live.
🛠️ New: Bring Data from Airtable into ChatGPT
We’re excited to announce a new Airtable app for ChatGPT is now available. Users can now bring data and operational context from Airtable into the flow of your ChatGPT conversations. That means you can directly interact with your Airtable data—and make quick updates—without leaving the chat.
Airtable for ChatGPT is ideal for any workflow where you need quick access to structured data to inform decisions and drive action. You can now:
- Reference Airtable data while generating content in ChatGPT: Pull the latest product roadmap updates as you prepare for a meeting, analyze patterns in customer feedback, or understand why your best marketing campaigns are overperforming.
- Give ChatGPT operational context: Instead of switching between tools, bring structured, internal data directly into the conversation to inform your work.
- Make quick updates to Airtable without leaving the chat: Keep your bases current with the changes that matter, right from ChatGPT.
Learn more (+get started) here →
🎥 Community Change Makers: Building a Dodgeball Performance & Logistics App With Erica Pascual
Change Makers is our series highlighting customer stories and builders making an incredible impact with Airtable.
Erica Pascual first discovered Airtable in 2018 while working in sales, where she built her entire lead management system that transformed her workflow.
Today, she’s still using Airtable professionally, but also to manage her competitive dodgeball career, creating a comprehensive system for tournament tracking, training, and performance analysis. During the inaugural Airtable Community hackathon last year, Erica submitted her app and won in two categories.
Learn more about her build here →
📚 ICYMI: “Share your best & unusual AI use-cases”
Check out this recent post from user
How: Using ChatGPT 5.2 AI field agents to extract a book’s publication data from pictures of its front cover & front matter
Why this is super handy: Using Airtable’s mobile app, I can snap two pics of a book with my phone and bam, catalogued!
Add your unusual AI use-case here →
📅 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:
January 22 | Airtable 2026: The New Playbook
Unlock the latest Airtable strategies at this live session where experts share actionable insights, workflows, and play-by-play tactics to help you accelerate your success with Airtable. Don’t miss this chance to level up your skills and connect with the community! (Register here →)
January 28 | Operationalizing AI
This AI User Group event focuses on how to move AI from experimentation to real operational impact. | (Register here →)
January 29 | Lessons from UVA on Scaling Airtable
An upcoming Airtable EDUser Group meeting sharing practical tips on building a CoE culture, and a framework for scaling Airtable. | (Register here →)
January 30 | Marketing Campaign Operations: From Intake to Exec Reporting
Airtable Marketing User Group session focused on using Airtable to bring calm and clarity to campaign execution. (Register here →)
February 4 | Set the Table: Builder Basics
New to Airtable? This interactive 45-minute session is the perfect place to start! You’ll get a hands-on introduction to Airtable with guided demos, a chance to build along in real time, and expert answers to your questions. (Register here →)
🧑🏫 Academy Updates
We’re always evolving Airtable Academy to reflect your feedback and learning goals:
🆕 New Launches
Learning Path: Agentic Deep Dive
Ready to move beyond "what do field agents do" and start building real solutions with them? Our new Agentic Deep Dive learning path in Airtable Academy has six courses designed for builders who are ready to design and deploy AI-powered, fully agentic workflows. Courses in the learning path include:
- Automate Contractor Payments with Attachment Analysis
- Verify Brand Consistency with Image Analysis
- Find Local Partners for Community Programs with Research Comapnies
- Enrich your CRM Records with Company Insights Using Research Companies
- Visualize Product Concepts with Image Generation
- Source Location Photos for Event Planning with Find Image from Web
Each course is centered on a real-world use case. You’ll design and build a working solution, learning how to apply the main types of field agents along the way.
What you’ll get in each course:
- Real business scenarios and challenges
- Hands-on building challenges in every course
- A copy of the finished app to keep and build on
- Guidance on how to optimize and extend your workflows
If you want to design more robust, scalable, and thoughtful solutions with Airtable, this learning path is for you.
Start the Agentic Deep Dive learning path →
🚀 Product Launch Recap
This month’s updates are all about power, precision, and accessibility—from smarter AI actions to more flexible record relationships and automation logic.
✅ Display Names for Linked Records
You can now set linked records to display and search by a more human-readable field (instead of the primary field), making your apps easier to navigate, understand, and use -- especially when working with IDs or reference keys.
Use cases:
- Replace cryptic record IDs with readable names like project titles or client names
- Simplify lookup fields across complex bases with cleaner linked record views
- Improve usability for external stakeholders and non-technical teammates
✅ Automations: Nested Advanced Logic
Builders can now nest conditional logic in repeating groups, use repeating groups inside conditionals, and even nest conditionals inside other conditionals -- opening the door to much more advanced automation workflows.
Use cases:
- Create dynamic approval workflows that change based on form inputs or user roles
- Send targeted Slack messages only when a condition is met inside a repeating group
- Automate record creation, branching logic, and escalation flows in a single automation
✅ Ask Omni Anything in Comment Threads
We’ve upgraded the Comment Summarize feature -- now you can ask Omni specific questions about a thread and get instant answers, even when discussions get long or complex.
Use cases:
- Quickly find the final decision in a multi-person comment thread
- Ask Omni who’s responsible for the next steps without reading the entire convo
- Surface timeline decisions or blockers to help keep projects on track
✅ Interface Omni Buttons
Omni Buttons allow you to place prewritten AI instructions directly into your Interface pages. With one click, anyone can trigger smart Omni actions, like analyzing data, summarizing notes, or auto-generating records, using context-aware prompts crafted by the builder.
Use cases:
- Empower users to generate custom reports with a single click
- Launch AI-powered data cleanups or transformations without editing base logic
- Help teammates summarize notes or flag anomalies in real time
✅ Sync and Edit Self-Linked Records Across Bases
Self-linked records (like nested tasks or hierarchical org charts) can now be synced across bases without breaking the link structure. Maintain complex relationships across distributed teams, projects, or systems.
Use cases:
- Keep manager–report hierarchies synced across HR and IT systems
- Maintain project → subtask relationships across multiple department-specific bases
- Sync content dependencies across editorial planning and publishing workflows
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!
