These are really exciting features - thank you! Sad that most of them are limited to enterprise customers.

For the AI features, will it be possible to query my Airtable bases, add and modify records, etc. using chatGPT-like interfaces? 

Is there a way to turn off the left nav on an interface? It's taking up a lot of real estate and totally throwing off the designs I've worked so hard to perfect. ☹

Yes, two-way-sync exclusively for Enterprise is a real downer for our five person team. So out of reach.

Airtable does this with every launch...... "Hey, here's a cool feature that you all have been barking about for years. Triiiiiiiiiiiiick, it's only available to Walmart and Apple." 

So... all of these new features are enterprise only? 😑

@Stephanie_Sosa wondering what you meant by this statement..... "These features will be a game changer for teams of all sizes—helping them build the apps they need on a scalable, secure platform." Were you referring to teams of all sizes within a big enterprise? Or do you have a timeline to when the statement applies to small businesses as well? 

Dear Airtable team, you really need to rework your pricing structure and plans, badly. The gap between Pro and Enterprise is impossible for (I believe) so many smaller companies and users. Adding features, limits, etc. a-la-carte would really cater to the individual needs of your customer base. It would help us grow more organically. 

👋  Hey all! 

I want to recognize that, yes, a lot of these are currently for those on our Airtable Enterprise plan and I know this can be frustrating if you're not on Enterprise. 

Second, we hear you on pricing and packaging! The good news is that we're actively working on updating our plans to better enable customers to get access to enterprise features...so stay tuned in the coming months for updates 😄

Can't open interfaces in new tab, not an improvement imo if we're loosing that. I also want to echo the sentiment that it would be great if we could collapse the sidebar when not needed.

Would really like the ability to turn off the left panel navigation. It takes away valuable real estate for those of us who don't have a ton of pages. A list of a handful on top was perfect.

Edit: Having used this all day I really dislike it. It has shifted my interface in a way it made it less usable, making columns thinner. There's now a big long strip of completely empty colored space with no purpose. The resizing doesn't even go far enough, so I have empty space to the right and the bottom. Even making it collapsable would remove the old way of navigating on the top strip. This should absolutely be user choice. I can totally see how this would be useful for some people with lots of pages, so make it an option for them! It has made Airtable worse for me.

@Stephanie_Sosa It would be great if we could hide the left navigation bar, because it takes up a lot of extra width on interfaces. It has made several of our interfaces more difficult for people to use who have small laptop screens.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Would really like the ability to turn off the left panel navigation. It takes away valuable real estate. In addition, we don't want everyone to see all the interfaces, we want to be able to hide them if needed. 

To everyone disappointed by this AI announcement, let me put a finer point on this topic.

1. Airtable cannot be your AI savior. They will make mistakes (as most companies do) trying to bolt on existing AI features. It appears this is fundamentally what they did - they integrated ChatGPT completions into a new field type. This has been possible (using #low-code) since 2021. Many months ago, Make added this capability. I think Zapier has something as well. This demonstrates a predictable lack of innovation or possibly they just didn't have the time to wow us.

2. Airtable will be very conservative; AI is a risky business. They will not provide innovative AI solutions for a long time because they must maintain a very stringent level of trust for their enterprise customers.

3. Using your data with AI can be very costly. Airtable's business model has no payment architecture for this, nor is there an incentive to provide one. Furthermore, completion-based inferencing is 600 times more costly than embedding-based inferencing. I've written about it here, and here. They are not ready to hand over the keys to the AI process which could cost them more than they charge you for your Airtable service. Limited enterprise tests are different.

These and many other items will cause AI innovation to be sluggish. By the time they release this and it works its way into the lower customer classes, the AI industry will be much further down the road. As such, you need to push forward with your AI features by leaning on aftermarket products like CustomGPT and consultants who know AI well.

Last month I predicted this announcement and probably gave them far too much credit for innovative AI strengths. If you want to move the AI needle for your projects, find people who deeply understand AGI and begin to innovate. This post provides five key things you can do right now.

While Airtable may not be bearing AI gifts this year, it has an effective and agile system that caused you to adopt it. To accelerate your solutions in AI, you need to employ all the existing Airtable features, including events, webhooks, automations, integrated scripting, and the vast capacity to organize your data such that it can take advantage of artificial general intelligence.

I totally understand - you came here looking for #no-code and AI would be nice, perhaps expected. The reality is that if you want cutting-edge AI features, you have to bend a little or be very patient. In a recent article (just a few days ago) I recognized Airtable's likely AI fumble, and I was right. However, it has all the mechanisms to do amazing things today with its very open and programmable features.

I notice 'Hide from Navigation' is no longer an option in the new Interfaces navigation side-panel. Is this feature deprecated now?

Also, will we be able to nest our interface pages? ie. press the down arrow next to an interface page to show nested pages, and hide as well?

@Stephanie_Sosa- similarly to the recently updated Airtable Home Page, where a toggle was given to users that allowed us to switch between the previous experience and the new development, may we also please be given a toggle that allows users to switch between the previous (and better) Interface layout and the newly released look, that - to be honest, feels lob-sided and is killing my happiness with wasted screen space.

Further to this, make the toggle manually OPT-IN, so users get to chose when they try out the new look - and can give valuable input on what they like and dislike at a time of their own choosing. 

I'd really appreciate if Airtable could focus their UI team on fixing problems that the community has raised year on year (such as issues with Kanban and Gnatt View, and the need for field Labels in Grid View, and all the bugs that hide within a Grouped Grid View). As of last week, interfaces worked just fine - but now it feels like this recent work is a step backwards.

@Stephanie_Sosa  

This sounds great! Hopefully we can buy single user enterprise licenses for a decent price 😁 Can wait to hear more.

"The good news is that we're actively working on updating our plans to better enable customers to get access to enterprise features..."

While I'm on an enterprise account, your step with the interfaces is a BIG step backward. The left panel takes up valuable screen real estate and does not work with the interfaces we have set up. Please either let us hide it for icons or put it back on top. Whoever designed the new homepage and this should be sat down and talked to, because both have been horrible.

I’ve gotta echo the sentiments shared here that the new sidebar is a pretty big regression for my use and my client’s uses, and likely many non-enterprise customers? 99% of the time my users only ever need to be in 1 interface, jumping between tabs within that interface. Why would the UI default to assuming that users need multiple pages in multiple interfaces visible so often that they’re willing to give up precious real-estate to the actual interface?

Are you testing these features with non-enterprise customers before launching?

I think giving us the option to revert a base’s interfaces nav back to the old one would go a long way in making everyone happy here. E.g. a base with only a few interfaces could have the old treatment, a base with many interfaces could choose to use the new sidebar.

Looking forward to what the new pricing options bring for smaller businesses that can’t afford enterprise prices but could benefit greatly from features like two-way sync!

Great features indeed. 

I highly support @Mark_Newton & @Cara_Van_Meter comments toggling the pannel would be great as the design of dozens of my interfaces is completely messed up with the new pannel.

The ability to navigate through the different pages of an app using shortcuts would be great too.

Echoing the sentiment about the left side UI column!

But...

if that (in the future collapsable) column would let me create and select sections (sub pages) of one and the same interface (record) for the purposes of organising very big and lengthy interfaces into sections, I could get on board of the left hand column idea.

But just for the purpose of switching interfaces, the loss of screen space if a massive drawback.

"I'd really appreciate if Airtable could focus their UI team on fixing problems that the community has raised year on year ..."

"Are you testing these features with non-enterprise customers before launching?"

This pretty much sums up Airtable in the last years 😶

@Stephanie_Sosa This announcement seems to have stirred something in the community.

I have not been here long enough to speak of years. But I am observing and sensing something that is similar, though not as extreme as at Webflow - a gap between the often voiced concerns and needs (including company sponsored "wishlists") of the user base and the actual roadmap of the company. 

And much of the frustration, both here as well as at Webflow seems to be mainly a communications issue. Developments come at us, seeminlgly random. For weeks and weeks we are kept "busy" with "Questions of the Week" while nothing seems to happen and then we get new colors. I guess this wouldn't be an issue at all if there were a better understanding where this is headed for us. I know that the development potential is endless for your team and the resources have a limit. And I know that the needs of the user base are not unanimous.

At our company we need and want development that supports our various business and use cases. I would think that this statement holds true for most in this user base. And while not everyone will agree on details, there seems to be a big overall theme moving in many users. You have opened a massive new chapter with great potential for everyone with Interfaces last year (that's why we signed up). And I personally feel that this chapter needs some serious writing and focus before other massive new chapters (like AI) have any relevance for our business. We are outgrowing the abilities of the current state of interfaces at a much faster pace than development is happening. That might be totally normal, I guess. But it would be really helpful if there were more detailed communication from your development HQ what we can expect in the next weeks and months. Because we often spend a lot of time building work arounds (for non-existent features) and often enough solutions are introduced by Airtable shortly thereafter. We could have saved all that time, had we known it's coming. I am not going to nail you to dates. But a clearer view of the road ahead would make our lives a lot easier. And announcements like "exciting updates are coming", may seem useful from a marketing perspective, but they are quite useless for the hands-on user.

...and as a total side note: AI would not even appear on our wishlist. To us this current type of AI is a hype with often concerning consequences. We write content that comes from the heart and that reflects our company`s views and values. Regardless of how well crafted an AI text may be, it is never of human origin. And that in itself is a problem, if you really want to make connections with other humans.

Thank you for listening.

I agree with most of the comments here regarding the Nav left side-panel. To me this seems like a bad use of screen real estate specially when the interface was designed to be a more concise and a customisable way to view all your data which the Data view lacked.

Being forced to see the left side panel all the time is distracting and does seem like a step backwards compared to only seeing the interface you are currently working on.

An example, at our workplace we have spent a long time customising an interface for each of our team divisions AND majority of our clients, that is over 20 interfaces. I rarely ever go on any other interface apart from my own team's interface as I have all the info I need on our own interface.

So seeing all interfaces every time is a pretty big waste of space for me. Even if we have the ability to hide the side-panel it is still a step backwards because if I want to go to a different sub-page. I will have to click to open the side-panel, find my interface amongst a huge list, and click on the sub-page. Where before it was simple, its at the top nav which is clearly visible and quick to click. That would be quite frustrating!

I have a feeling that there was a lack of user research on a big design change like this. Looks like a quick survey to your most active users could have directed this design change a bit better.

... AI would not even appear on our wishlist. To us this current type of AI is a hype with often concerning consequences.

@Tobias_LGKR- well said. This is sadly representative of the knee-jerk of AI, which I regard as the remedy for laziness. AI, specifically AGI (artificial general intelligence), has its place, and there are vast opportunities to employ it for great user benefit. Innovators often mistake newfound AI capabilities as features.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) straightens the line between what is known and what we need to know while adding our own context.

Some of the comments in this thread have called out the most apparent AI benefit - using their data with LLMs. This is the magic of AGI; a straight line between users who have questions and answers.

AI is the UI; Data is the API.

While Airtable takes its first shaky and perhaps misdirected steps in AI (which I sarcastically predicted two weeks ago), it still has not delivered a modern search and findability framework. Yet, at the core of AGI and large language models lay the answer to an issue that has plagued Airtable for a decade - semantic search. Building an embedding-based search and discovery feature is the least expensive, most powerful capability that AI could provide.

Henry Ford heard customers loud and clear; they wanted faster horses. He gave them automobiles. Airtable gave us embroidered saddles.

The new left side-panel for navigation is unhelpful and a step backwards in usability.

Putting the links to different interfaces on the left hand side is unnecessary for my users but not terrible.

OTOH, moving the page navigation to be sub-menus in the left hand nav is confusing and may be disorientating for some of our users.   This is because our UI is based on based pages being top level hierarchy and tabs being second level hierarchy.  This was intuitive in the previous design.  Now, pages have less prominence than tabs. 

Can we at least have the option to add page navigation back to the top of the interface, horizontally?

Thanks