Hi Airtable Community,
Today, we’re announcing new capabilities that unlock a new level of scale and sophistication for the workflows you build on Airtable. With today’s launch, Airtable is taking a massive step forward in becoming your digital operations platform for the AI era.
You’ve shown us that there is a gap in the market:
- On one hand, project management, collaboration, and SaaS point solutions are often quickly adopted by teams, but don’t scale up to solve cross-functional business processes. These tools have bolted on AI features that are limiting and inflexible.
- On the other hand, there’s the heavyweight approach of building your own custom internal apps from scratch. While this route allows greater control, you’re bottlenecked by technical teams who have a laundry list of requests from the business. With AI, this path is just too slow and disconnected from real business impact.
Airtable offers a different way. The people closest to the process – all of you – own your workflows and adapt your business apps with agility. You build on top of a foundation of shared data sets, enterprise governance, and security. And you experiment rapidly to find meaningful ways to infuse AI into your processes.
Join us on October 1st for live demos and Q&A with the Product & Design teams behind these new capabilities!
What’s new?
Standardize and scale app creation with App Library
Why we built it: We heard that our customers struggle with balancing “global visibility” with “local flexibility” when designing their processes and the apps that power them.
- Deploying a standardized process is expensive and time consuming. When standardized tooling is too rigid, teams go rogue, adoption is compromised, and reporting is unreliable.
- Once deployed, processes are fragile and hard to change. Workflows are changing constantly as business needs adapt.
- AI best practices need to be shared. Without a platform to share these discoveries, best practices aren’t scaled out across teams.
How it works:
- Define and manage standardized apps that are unique to your company, known as managed apps. These apps contain a core data schema, automations, interfaces, and AI workflow actions.
- Publish apps to App Library.
- Allow teams to install and adapt their own versions of the apps, while the core data schema remains “locked down” across apps.
- Push updates to all apps instantly, such as a new single select field, a new automation, or a refreshed interface design.
- Roll up data for global reporting using sync.
- Using managed components, builders can also publish and manage pieces of a complete app, such as a group of standardized fields.
App Library is available today to customers on the Enterprise Scale plan.
Put massive data sets to work with HyperDB
Why we built it: We heard that enterprises want to put their massive data sets into operational workflows, not just visualize the data or have it sit in a data warehouse where teams can’t access it.
- Store hundreds of millions of records in a single table, then build apps on top of it.
- Data can’t be operationalized into workflows. Enterprise data platforms such as Snowflake store highly valuable data sets, but business teams can’t easily access that data to build workflows.
- Lack of control over data access. Data teams are swamped with constant requests to configure reporting and give access to data sets. Business teams often go rogue using unsanctioned methods to access data.
- Data teams are overwhelmed. Workflows are changing constantly as business requirements adapt, and shifts in work require re-engagement with an overloaded data team, slowing down innovation.
How it works:
- Admins centrally manage massive data sets in HyperDB
- Data can be synced from an external source or stored natively in Airtable.
- Sync subsets of data into your apps to build workflows around them. Note, the subsets of data that are synced into apps must still be under 250K records per table.
HyperDB enters beta today. Contact your Airtable account representative to learn more and get access.
Make changes with confidence in App Sandbox
Why we built it: When your Airtable app is used by hundreds or thousands of end users, it can be nerve-wracking to make changes. We’ve even heard of builders working on nights and weekends just to avoid the risk that they might disrupt an end user’s workflow during the work day. We’ve built App Sandbox in direct response to our users saying they want safer, more predictable ways to make changes.
How it works:
- From within a base, creators can enable App Sandbox where they can make changes to schema, automations, and interfaces.
- The live base now becomes known as “Production,” and structural changes must now be made through the App Sandbox.
- Once you’re ready, review those changes and push them into the production application.
App Sandbox enters beta today for customers on the Business and Enterprise Scale plans. To join the waitlist, submit this form.
Reflect your identity with Organization Branding
Why we built it: We heard from countless customers that the Airtable apps they built ended up feeling like applications made just for their company. We wanted to take that experience further and enable builders to visually reflect their own company’s look and feel in their apps.
How it works:
- Admins set their organization logo and color options with exact hex codes
- Builders can choose to display those branding choices in their app
Organization branding is available today to customers on the Enterprise Scale plan.
To see these new capabilities in action, be sure to join us on October 1 for live demos and Q&A with our Product & Design teams!
We can’t wait to see what you build with this next generation of Airtable for the enterprise. In the meantime, drop your questions for our team in the comments.
Alex McDonnell, Director Product Marketing
(on behalf of the Airtable team)
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