Highlights:

  • Without requiring highly specialized technical knowledge, businesses can incorporate generative AI across their organizations and workflows with Airtable AI.
  • Knowledge workers and employees may use Airtable’s platform to select and choose the data they want to feed, and then the generative AI will take care of the rest.

Airtable, a no-code platform for creating workflows and apps, disclosed that it is opening access to Airtable AI and commencing a beta program, enabling organizations to create and use generative AI applications for business workflows and productivity.

Without requiring highly specialized technical knowledge, businesses can incorporate generative AI across their organizations and workflows with the help of Airtable AI. Generative AI, a subset of AI that can generate new text in response to user input, can be used to automate communication, create marketing content, and summarize customer comments.

For a small group of users in a limited alpha during May, Airtable AI was first released. A considerable number of media, technology, retail, and service industries will participate in the beta program. Later this summer, the program will expand to include the hundreds of organizations utilizing the platform. Using the AI building block, they can leverage their data and operational functions to experiment with AI capabilities.

Howie Liu, Chief Executive and Co-founder of Airtable said, “The current generation of large language models are already highly capable of advanced reasoning and creativity tasks and can be applied to a broad range of knowledge work. Enterprises can now use Airtable’s no-code approach to immediately integrate these powerful models in the context of their existing data and workflows, making it possible to rapidly build and deploy highly engaging, AI-powered apps.”

Knowledge workers and employees may use Airtable’s platform to select and choose the data they want to feed, and then the generative AI will take care of the rest, according to Anthony Maggio, Senior Director of product management. As a result, it is easier to use and integrate with the database and automation platform of Airtable directly to access the company’s data.

According to Maggio, the basic models from OpenAI LP, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, will be available to users of Airtable AI right from the launch. Although the AI building block itself is model-independent, it will eventually be able to access models tailored specifically for businesses.

“It really gives teams the ability to harness the power of these new AI models within their own workflows. So, the data that they’re storing or they’re capturing as part of their workflows can be pushed into this new AI building block and actually perform steps of their workflow or accelerate pieces of their process,” added Maggio.

He also reported that AI integrations are often very broad or too generic to be helpful for teams with specialized needs, or they require technical skills to make them function within business operations, which is not ideal. “Because it’s integrated as a building block into our platform as a whole, we really see this as the best way for enterprises to be able to give their employees the ability to experiment with utilizing this new technology,” he mentioned.

During the alpha phase, users applied the new AI building block in various ways, such as using classification algorithms and sentiment analysis to determine whether consumer feedback is positive or negative. Others use the Airtable AI system to lessen the monotony of content creation and categorization tasks for employees.

The service can enhance product development by automatically classifying and categorizing massive volumes of user research and prioritizing commonly asked questions to produce potential FAQ documents for products or services based on consumer feedback. Considering customer feedback, the same method might be used to modify resources and product descriptions.

Although Airtable AI now only supports text-generative AI, according to Maggio, the company is considering investing in image generation, classification, tagging, and search in the future.

Customers can sign up on the business website portal if they want to be added to the waitlist for the expanded beta. Later this year, clients can purchase Airtable AI as an optional feature; details regarding cost and availability will be released soon.