📢 Introducing Actionable Messages: Seamlessly Interact with Airtable Data in Slack! 🚀

[Chris_Ferrer]

Hi Airtable Community! I’m Chris, a Product Manager here at Airtable. We're thrilled to announce Actionable Messages! 🎉 Actionable Messages lets you take act on Airtable data from Slack. No more switching between apps, just seamless updates.

What are Actionable Messages? Never miss a beat—you and your team receive gentle nudges for tasks that need their attention, and can take immediate action in Slack: make updates, approve assets, triage bugs, and more.

How to Get Started? It's easy! Builders can add the Slack Actionable Messages Automation to your existing or new workflows. Select a trigger, set up the Slack message, and watch the updates flow in. It's as simple as that!

Some Example Use Cases:
✅Approvals:

• Approve PTO requests instantly
• Review creative assets effortlessly

🧐 Intake and Triage:

• Categorize IT tickets quickly
• Acknowledge escalations with a click

⚡️ Updates:

• Remind someone to close open tickets

Please share your feedback and questions here!

[Jack_Manuel]

@Chris_Ferrer no appears to be resolved now, thanks.

[cubeghost]

Really excited for this!

However, it seems like there's a bug or unexpected behavior with scheduled automations. If a previous automation run is still awaiting a response on the Slack message, the next run will fail to send to Slack at all- the "Recipient" field is mysteriously missing, even if it's configured as a static value (in this case, a public channel). 

For our workflow, we need the latest task information sent to Slack, where the end user can complete their task and then mark it as done with the actionable button.

[Helen_Fletcher]

Mine is failing when using slack IDs - it works with email. It previously worked using slack IDs before it was actionable...

[Anna]

Loving this feature! So much fun. One teeny ask - when will we be able to add a bot name and icon for actionable messages the same way we can with non-actionable messages? This may sound like a small thing, but we use these fields extensively to communicate different actions (for example, we use the thumbs-up icon to indicate approval). It really helps when scrolling through a Slack channel to be able to differentiate between different types of notifications. Please and thank you!

[pascalm]

@Chris_Ferrer 

This is an awesome feature and I've already built out a bunch of automations using it and keen to get it implemented into our approvals process.

But I'm having an issue with the actionable messages "expiring".

After about 5 minutes once the automation has run and the slack message has been sent, if it hasn't had a response yet it cancels the step and is unable to update the record from slack.
This is what it looks like in airtable.

And when you action the message in slack after 5 minutes has elapsed you get this message "The automation that sent this message has been canceled or deleted."

Is this a bug or do I have to change something about the automations?

Thanks in advance! Keen to see the potential of this.

[ScottWorld]

@pascalm 

You’ve hit upon one of several limitations with this feature. One limitation is that the links expire after 7 days (they definitely shouldn’t be expiring after 5 minutes). Another limitation is that only logged-in Airtable users who have editing access to the field can perform the action. Another limitation is that the actions can only be performed once. The full list of limitations are outlined in this support article.

The solution & workaround to all of these limitations is to simply send your own custom links to Slack by using Make’s custom webhooks, which then will trigger whatever actions you want in Airtable using Make’s Airtable automations.

I give detailed step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish this in this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast. In the podcast, I discuss doing this with email, but it’s the exact same process with Slack.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld 

[pascalm]

Thanks @ScottWorld,

Shortly after I posted that comment the issue with it cancelling after 5 min was obviously fixed and it no longer does that. I haven't tested it for longer that 7 days too.

The permission limitation is also very much an issue for me. The reason I was so excited for this feature was to enable my employees to update relevant information.

But I'll definitely try it on Make. Thanks!

[Lillian]

Which fields do the buttons work with? When I connected a button to an open text field it just cleared the text when I clicked the button. I would love to be able to update an open text field by clicking on a button.

[Nathan_Feemster]

Can we get access to the response when an action is taken? For instance if someone clicks the 'Approved' button in your example, I want to know the slack userID of that person so I can update the record on button click. It would be an addition to the dynamic fields available in the record update UI that follows the button action. I would add a Response packet Item under the "Use Data From.."

[dk82734]

Hey @Chris_Ferrer , my team and I have been using Slack Action Message automations from Airtable for the past 1-2 weeks so far.

The biggest *issue* we see is that when any one Slack user in that channel clicks on any of the action buttons, there is no *immediate* feedback to the channel about the fact that this button was clicked (and by whom).  I'm pretty sure Slack has a way to support that -- where after clicking a button, all other buttons grey out and Slack adds something to the message to indicate *who* clicked the button.  That would really help make this an excellent feature -- as it stands right now, we can't really use this automation for any serious operational workloads, because of this current limitation.

If this fix is already in the works, can you provide a rough ETA as to when it might be resolved?