Welcome to the September 2025 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 the LinkedIn newsletter)
- In the Airtable Community (check the Onboarding Resources section)
Let’s take a look back at what happened in Airtable last month.
Two new AI capabilities now available in AI Labs
We recently rolled out two new capabilities into AI Labs: AI-generated interface elements and AI Image generation. Read more about each below.
AI-Generated Interface Elements
This new capability lets you build bespoke interfaces to visualize and act on your data in completely new ways. Just describe what you want to Omni, and Omni creates an interface within minutes.
Here are just a few examples of the types of interfaces that builders have already created:
- A 3D viewer to explore product models and cost breakdowns
- A heatmap of revenue by region and segment
- A network diagram showing relationships between members of a community
- A map of potential store openings
- An infinite canvas for visualizing a workflow
Learn more about AI-generated interface elements (and enabling AI Labs) →
Image Generation
We’ve introducing a new type of field agent that lets you generate images inside your Airtable base (building off of the "Generate image with AI" automation action we released a couple of months ago in beta). This makes it easier to add visuals to your existing research or serve as a source for inspiration -- without leaving your workflow.
With image generation, you can create copy and images at scale, translate and localize content for any region and/or audience in minutes, and enforce brand consistently across every creative asset -- based on the exact context and direction you provide your Field Agent(s).
Read more about AI image generation (and watch a quick demo) →
🧮 Solved! Calculate the average of your top 20% and bottom 20% of your dataset.
A recent post by
Although a potentially complex problem to solve, user
Check out the full post and solution →
️ “The Rise of the IC CEO”: Howie Liu featured on the Lenny’s Podcast
Howie Liu, CEO of Airtable, was recently featured on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast (“Lenny’s Podcast”) detailing how he led the radical transformation and reorganization of Airtable as an AI-native company.
What you’ll learn:
- The “fast thinking” vs. “slow thinking” team structure that lets Airtable ship AI features weekly (inspired by Daniel Kahneman)
- Why Howie uses AI hourly (not daily) and is Airtable’s #1 inference-cost user globally
- Why CEOs must become ICs again in the AI era (and how to restructure your calendar to make it possible)
- Why “playing” with AI tools should be mandatory—Howie tells employees to cancel all meetings for a week to experiment
- The specific skills product managers, engineers, and designers need to develop to succeed in the AI era
🤩 Introducing: Community Change Makers!
Our new Change Makers series highlights community members and builders using Airtable in innovative ways to make incredible impact.
Each month, you’ll:
- Learn about a new Airtable builder and their Airtable use-case
- Find a short demo/video walkthrough of their Airtable app
- Be able to grab the prompt they used (+model they chose) to power their Field Agent(s)
- See the quantifiable, measurable impact they’ve created.
This month, Dominique Festa, Data and Operations Director at HearstLab, shares how she used Omni to radically transform their revisit pipeline by automatically resurfacing passed startups every 180 days — doubling her team’s review cadence without adding capacity!
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:
September 16 | AI User Group: Deploying AI Plays
Learn how to use an Airtable AI Play to fit your workflow—no need to build from scratch, as these pre-built AI workflows are designed to help you get more from Airtable, faster. (Register here →)
September 17 | EDUser Group: Scaling Ops at HOKALI
Discover how HOKALI’s Head of Ops and Airtable Partner Boltflow leveraged Airtable to scale nationwide after-school programs, streamline operations, and automate workflows. (Register here →)
September 18 | Media & Entertainment User Group: Streamlining Event Attendance
Learn how to streamline event attendance from request approvals to finance reports, with insider tips that will completely change the way you manage events. (Register here →)
🧑
Academy Updates
We’re always evolving Airtable Academy to reflect your feedback and learning goals.
Content Updates
This quarter, the Academy team is hard at work updating all existing courses to reflect recent UI changes. The in-product video walkthroughs and interactive tutorials in the following courses now feature the updated Airtable UI:
- Welcome to Airtable | Designed for users, who are brand new to Airtable. This is an introductory course which will give you a basic understanding of the Airtable platform, apps and workspaces.
- Navigating Airtable | In this course, we will explain how to navigate the home screen, how to organize the home screen and how to navigate between home screen and apps.
- Translating Workflows to Airtable | In this course, we’ll introduce you to workflow mapping and show you an example of an Airtable app built according to a workflow map.
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.
Roadmap interface view
Keep an eye on the big picture and ensure complex projects stay on track with our new Roadmap view.
Roadmaps work like two-dimensional kanban boards: in addition to the typical “columns”, roadmaps also have “rows” corresponding to groups as they typically appear in Airtable. This view type has a large emphasis on density to help with high-level use cases such as roadmap planning. You can drag items across rows and columns as you update your plans and priorities.
Use cases:
- Product planning across departments and timelines
- Cross-functional roadmaps grouped by status, owner, or initiative
- Strategic portfolio management with high-level overviews
Interface QOL improvements
We've added a few small, but mighty, improvements to interfaces, including:
- Record detail sheets and grid layout columns can be resized
- Forms can be reordered
- Filters can be copied and pasted across any elements as long as they share the same table
- Gallery cards have some new styles to work with: Simple, Minimal, and Rich
Use cases:
- Streamline layouts for dashboards and record views
- Reuse filters efficiently across multiple elements
- Customize gallery cards for tailored visual storytelling
Gong sync
Quickly turn customer conversations into actionable insights with our new external sync source, Gong. Anyone with a business or enterprise plan can ingest transcripts from Gong to automate customer feedback analysis in bases.
Use cases:
- Centralize sales and support calls for product feedback analysis
- Automate qualitative research from real customer conversations
- Connect Gong data with roadmap planning or support triage workflows
Azure DevOps integration
Simplify workflows for enterprise organizations with our new Azure DevOps integration. All enterprise users can now access one-way data imports from Azure DevOps.
Use cases:
- Sync epics or user stories into planning dashboards
- Align engineering timelines with product or marketing teams
- Track development progress alongside business OKRs
Horizontal company logos
Enterprises can add a horizontal company logo to display on interface sidebars when fully-expanded.
Use cases:
- Customize internal tools with consistent branding
- Differentiate between apps or departments visually
- Strengthen enterprise-wide design guidelines within Interfaces
Dashboard summary cards
Elevate your dashboards with summary cards that showcase individual records as snapshots with images and key details. Perfect for executive overviews, status updates, or project highlights.
Use cases:
- Showcase project leads or client profiles in dashboards
- Summarize key tasks or records with images and metrics
- Curate executive or stakeholder-facing visual rollups
View “What’s new in Airtable” →
🧑
#AirtableAcademy in the wild…
Spotlighting recently certified Airtable users, learnings, and celebrations from those using the #AirtableAcademy hashtag.
Excited to add a new skill to my toolkit: AI App Builder Certification from Airtable! For me, AI isn’t about replacing the human side of product/project management—it’s about working smarter, simplifying the manual work, and creating more space for strategy and impact. Always learning, always evolving.
Check out the full post here →
via Monica Alvarez:
Oh my gosh!! After eons of using Airtable for support operations and app building, I finally got my Airtable Builder Certification! Thanks hashtag#AirtableAcademy for making a super in depth course that was equally informative and fun to takeHappy to call myself a Certified Builder at last!
Check out the full post here →
via Sevanna Shields:
Adding to my Airtable Builder & Admin Certifications - I am now a Certified AI App Builder!There are so many great use cases for every team and I can't wait to bring them to life!
Check out the full post here →
via Daniel Larin:
I’m happy to share that I’ve obtained a new certification: AI App Builder Certification from Airtable! Excited to start leveraging AI-powered solutions to reimagine workflows, amplify innovation + productivity, and deliver next-level results
Check out the full post here →
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!