Introducing new ways to harness the power of AI, build apps, and connect data

[Stephanie_Sosa]

👋Hi all! I’m Stephanie, product marketer at Airtable and I'm so excited to introduce some powerful new features to help teams build AI-powered apps on top of shared data—all within a single, scalable platform.

Today, we’re bringing AI to Airtable, making Airtable the easiest and fastest way to deploy AI-powered applications across the enterprise. We're also releasing new features to empower teams to get up and running and build powerful apps quickly with a suite of pre-built applications for marketing and product teams. 

• Apps by Airtable: Get set up and running faster than ever with out-of-the-box apps built for critical use cases. Available for Enterprise.
• Verified data: Easily protect and manage your org’s most important data from one place, while making it accessible to those who need it most. Available for Enterprise.
• Two-way sync: Automatically sync data and edits back and forth between workflows so your teams can easily collaborate on the most up-to-date information. Available for Enterprise.

We’re rolling these updates out over the next week; if you don’t see them reflected in your workspace, hold tight! 

But something I’m super excited to announce is a new left navigation in Interface Designer. Now, we’re making it easier for you to quickly find and engage with the most important parts of their workflows. In addition to the updates we released back in March, Interface Designer makes it that much easier to build on Airtable. (And spoiler alert: we’re not done. Stay tuned for even more exciting updates to the app building experience)

Left Navigation: New left navigation panel for easy navigation between interfaces & pages.

But that’s not all, you’ll also see that we cleaned up the share view menu so that your teams can discover and share important views and data across the org.

Redesigned Share View Menu: Simplified sharing and syncing with a redesigned share view dialog.

These features will be a game changer for teams of all sizes—helping them build the apps they need on a scalable, secure platform. Learn more about these updates in our blog post!

We can’t wait to hear what you think, and see what you build, with these updates!

[ScottWorld]

@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. 

[kalessner]

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. 

[Bill_French]

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.

[Joseph_Roza]

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?

[Karlstens]

@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.

[RnJ]

@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..."

[joshsorenson]

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.

[Erin_Keeffe]

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!

[xad9119]

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.

[Tobias_LGKR]

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.