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!

[Databaser]

"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 😶

[Tobias_LGKR]

@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.

[JDB]

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.

[Bill_French]

... 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.

[ukcj]

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

[Erin_Keeffe]

AI would not even appear on our wishlist.

100% agree with this. Feels like clout chasing / hype train stuff especially in the face of so many other features we could benefit from more directly (mobile interfaces, long standing bugs, etc...). I am open to being proven wrong though if we get to try it out on Pro accounts! 😉

[Erin_Keeffe]

Shared this in another thread:

I would highly recommend people submit a feature request through the "Message support" option from the help menu in the top right of the Airtable app when in a normal base (not an interface). This is probably the best way to make noise that will get to people who can make decisions about this stuff. The more noise on the same topics the better.

In the chat that pops up, type a few words, hit enter, and click "No" for the help article suggestions until you get the option to click "Help with Airtable product", and then "Feature request" (or "Bug") at which point you can submit a request.

[Eric_McFetridge]

In an attempt to tackle this from all angles, I would like to note some concerns here. Being a creator on an enterprise plan, I have now have the new left hand navigation panel and am terrified of it rolling out to the rest of our team. Although I see its potential benefits, it is going to cause a ton of issues for our team, specifically in mobile use cases. Please please please consider making it an optional navigation change until some of these concerns are dealt with. I have also reached out to support on this.

[nwttyler]

The old interface menu was annoying (non-hidable, taking up screen real estate in a dashboard), the new interface menu is a true abomination and deserves it's own special place in hell. All navigation, menus, screen icons of ANY kind need to be hidable in interfaces. 

Users need a clean and unobstructed space to put their dashboard data that isn't cluttered with menus, alarm bells, share buttons, an icon containing the first letter of my username, the name of the dashboard I'm viewing, or ANYTHING ELSE what-so-ever. Put all this inside the left menu bar and add a hamburger icon in the upper left hand side of the screen to collapse and expand it. This is achievable in 4 lines of code (2 lines of CSS and 2 lines of javascript). 

Please listen to your users here. There are hundreds of users in the community boards sharing the same sentiments this morning following the release of this obtrusive "feature"

[Japheth_Beaty]

On a 32" 4k monitor running two browser windows side by side, that nav panel takes up 15% of my screen. When I have two interface windows side by side, that's approx FOUR INCHES of wasted blank coloured nav panel. Please undo this. Focus on Mobile Interfaces instead. "Hey, let's change this from the top to the side" gives me flashbacks of every pointless Facebook UI update.