Airtable and The Future of AI-Enabled Software

Like it is very much noise.

When you say that, you're saying that's because, uh, there's a big drop-off in functionality. My experience with the AI stuff is that it actually is more about displacement, right? So what happens is they're making the, the AI makes, uh, Airtable more useful to a, you know, a, a, a, a non-technical or a non-specialist customer., and usually is getting in the way of people who like to build, you know, deterministic automations around it because you've changed up the, the whole field. Uh, but that's good for Airtable and bad for the consultants, right? Because the Airtable now you get more business directly from the customers cuz they've increased the value to the customers, but they've taken away both the, they've taken away a lot of the utility that the, uh, that the consultants are then providing that sit on top of it, which may, which includes a lot of like the high-end Airtable use cases. Like Airtable interfaces used to be a very big thing. But the— if they're shifting to, hey, just have a database, then you chat with it, that's, that, that's displacement as well, right? And saying that the way that was used, being used before, is what they are then basically tossing out the window. And they're doing it in a way that allows them to be retaining more business because now they can have a customer come in, adopt without an intermediary, and be successful. And maybe be successful in a different way than it was before. But from a business point of view, what I've been seeing is that these tools that previously had these tack-on automation aspects that you really needed someone to help you with, they're increasing self-service by making it more conversational in the interface.

Yeah, and maybe it is a— maybe it's a maturity thing, right? But my experience is that it actually makes it harder, and in fact, it it's, it's lying to you, as many of the, many of the LLMs are, right? It makes, it makes it look simple. Um, but if you go in there, you can tell it to spin up a CRM, which it'll do very quickly, and you'll start using, and you'll start pulling in all of your contacts. But then as soon as you want something else, you want to do it something differently, all of that stuff, you're already— so, so again, in Airtable's benefit, right? So they've, they've, they've pushed, um, adoption, but they— or, uh, uh, sign up. I wouldn't say that it's pushed adoption. It just— it— and then that at that level of frustration, it's, um, it— so, so you're right in terms of the displacement, like, but I think it's a, it's a false— it's a, it's a false— a false sense of comfort, right? It's a false sense of spinning up your CRM really quickly using the AI bot, but then getting stuck two steps further and then being well and truly stuck because your data has now moved. You spent the three hours putting pulling in all of your data elements, but now you can't actually because it's not doing what you're doing. You don't know how to maintain it. You don't know what to do with it.

Yeah, I'm not really sure that's happening. You know, like the thing is like they are not only are they getting signups or getting activations or getting more sales, they're getting more sales that certainly look like, you know, self-service sales, which are smaller dollar sales. The tools that have gone native with this are wildly increasing their activation and the payments from their customers. So the idea that like, oh wait, you get a thing, but they're not really getting value out of it. They're just getting the numbers don't seem to be supporting that right now, you know? And like, I understand a lot of professionals are—

I'm talking about the users, right? I agree with you that it's the numbers for them are positive. I think it's a— it could be a frustrating thing from a user perspective.

But the users are keeping it, which is data from the market that they like this experience, you know? So like, I understand like this, the story that you're telling, and I don't doubt there are a number of people who are having that kind of experience, but there's an even larger number of people who are not having that experience or are finding that the value they're getting is outweighing that part and it's creating a lot of value. And I think us as professionals who, who sort of look around the next turn need to be, and like, I see this with like other tools too that have like a significant, you know, no-code or visual development type history or whatever. And then AI gets introduced and like people who have been working with it previously all complain about it. Right. And then, but people who are native to the new tech love it. And what you discover is that the theory of no-code was there's so many more people who want to, who are willing to use a visual platform or whatever, than people who can do dev. It's just not true anymore. I actually think that that's totally backwards now. There are actually more people who have taken some amount of programming in school who are in their mid-late 30s and at the peak of their careers. I think that's more true now than it was 5 years ago. The demographics have shifted underneath. Which means there are more people comfortable with code than there are people uncomfortable with code, particularly those that are interested in buying this stuff. And you combine that with the increase of accessibility of being able to just ask it to do things for you and it just does things for you. Go build me a CRM. It's not going to go replace Salesforce. And so there's a difference between that and I want to be able to collect my contacts, right? More specific job to be done part that people do that they're able to get a lot more value from much shorter period of time because you don't have to have a CRM built for them. They can just do something that does this job. Oh, you need something else? Great. We'll go do that. And it's super cheap to go build that because we're doing that conversationally. And that, that changes things from like what self-service can do, particularly people who have like just a little bit of being able to think about the system in their heads. People who can't, they still need that bit of that help. But I think that the, the idea of like what makes for a successful professional in these— I can't speak, like I said, I haven't worked with Airtable, so I can't speak to Airtable, you know, specifically in terms of being professional. I know other people who are professionals like yourself. Um, the, uh, but like in these other tools, it's never going back. It's not like, hey, this thing got added and it's just kind of BS, and then people are going to come back and like, you know, return to Jesus on it. What they're— what's— it's going to be like the new future that's going to look not like what it looked like in the, in the past, as it sort of gets sold out. And the numbers in there are definitely indicating that there's a lot of money in just adding in the AI, even as it feels a bit of a tack-on. Because the utility of being able to access your information directly through this kind of conversation makes a huge difference. And, you know, even the way like you're doing the job stuff using Claude right now, like the, the way you're using Claude, you're not creating software that you're gonna use over and over and over again forever. You're using, you're having it do a job you want to do right now. It looks more like delegation than like building and automation. And that difference in mental model of like something I can keep back and keep using and keep asking it to do something, you know, again later is where there's just so much value being unlocked and the customers are seeing it today and the professionals who are also seeing it can then see around the next turn and be providing value that sits on top of that. And then there's another class of professional who is not seeing that and sort of is being disconnected as you have this increased self-service through the stochastic conversational versus the deterministic, automation part. And one thing I really like about this group is like we're all seeing that, you know, that struggle and that seam and working on crossing that particular chasm. So then not only being able to catch up to where the users are today, but being able to anticipate where they're heading tomorrow.