Airtable AI

Airtable announced an upcoming AI field type which could generate images, summarize text using AI etc.  From the outside, the vision here is to be able to leverage AI within fields themselves. You configure which field you want to (take these fields, generate an image) and the AI field generates it. My guess would be its using OpenAI in the backend and when you configure the field, you’re basically configuring API parameters. That's what we see from the screenshots (shown below).

My initial reaction to this was negative. First off, like all power users, I hate change :)! Beyond that, I already leverage AI in Airtable by querying the OpenAI API directly using Airtable scripts. Why would I need an AI field. It felt more natural for me to me to integrate AI in the automations section of Airtable by making an OpenAI action for instance.

Not only did I feel that AI should be in Automations, I also felt like making it a field type breaks a primary rule in Airtable that fields map to data types. It's the first thing I teach students migrating from spreadsheets to Airtable: dates go into date fields, text goes into text fields. You define what you put into a field before creating it.

AI looks to break that rule: it can be text, an image, a date, who knows what will come out.

I even wrote a whole blog post about how I thought this was a bad idea. Why create a new field that seems to break the rules of Airtable when you have more natural and flexible integration points (automations).

AI is a new formula field

Let's break down what "AI" is (basically the API call): it takes a prompt and provides a response. Prompts themselves can be broken down further. It's an input with what you done by the computer.

Prompt: Summarize (action) this blog post (input).

If you squint, that's exactly what a (more powerful) formula field looks like! It takes existing data from your database and turns into something new. Let's look at what adding 7 days to a date looks like using a hypothetical AI field vs a formula:

AI Prompt: Add seven days to {date}

Formula: DATEADD({days}, 7, 'days')

One of those is much more intuitive than the other!

Why have people learn formulas when they can just say what they want? Not only does that make writing them easier but AI has so much more power than existing formulas.

Not to say that this field should be limited to formula usecases! Once I understood that an AI field type is formula field on steroids, I realized a field is a natural place for AI!

AI is more accessible as a field than an automation

Today you can use AI within Airtable using scripts. Only  a tiny minority of Airtable users can actually write Airtable scripts. Even though you can use AI today in Airtable, few do. By adding AI integrations as actions in Automations would definitely expand the numbers who could use AI within Airtable.

Now obviously, you, as a reader of AATT and anyone who has completed the Ultimate Guide to Airtable, are an automation professional so you know and use Airtable automations. But that's not the case for most Airtable users! Adoption of Automations isn't widespread.

By making AI a new field type instead of an Automation action, Airtable is drastically increasing the number of people who will at least give it a try! The barrier to entry is much lower if you have to configure a few drop downs as is the case with a field versus having to pick an action, configuring it, then adding an action, all in a different tab.

The cost of accessibility will be power

If we look at the teaser video Airtable shared, you can see that the prompt isn't freehand. You can only select certain actions like "summarize" or "write". In fact, the way it's teased, Airtable is severely limiting the prompts to the following structure

As a {persona} I want to {action} with {fields} for context

Obviously that's great for folks whose usecase fits squarely into that type of prompt. However, it's only addressing a tiny minority of possible things you can do with AI. You can't even use it to write better formulas as I imagined above! By making it more easy to use as a field, Airtable is potentially squashing all the amazing things that could be done with AI!

What I love about Airtable–and no-code generally–is that users' ingenuity knows no bounds. I'm always amazed at how people–people like you–will take something like Airtable and push it to its utmost limit to build the software you need to run your business. When I was at Airtable, launching something new was exciting yes because we were putting something out in the world but my excitement was mainly from seeing how folks would use it in novel ways.

Given that AI is the most exciting new "thing" (for lack of a better word) that we've seen in a long time, I'm excited that Airtable is making it accessible to all users as a field type instead of automation. However, by severely restricting what's possible within the field, I worry that it's ease of use kills all the amazing things that could have been built had Airtable trusted its users as it did in its past.