Airtable

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

What you can do with Airtable AI for $40

Running AI at scale is much more cost effective than you might think. Here are a few examples of AI outputs that each cost about $40 total, depending on the model you choose. 

• Analyze 1,000 competitor web pages to analyze their pricing strategies, messaging techniques, and market positioning.
• Transform 8,000 product feedback submissions into prioritized feature requests with impact scores and complexity estimates.
• Generate 10,000 localized social media captions tailored to your brand voice and campaign messaging for higher engagement rates.

Understanding credit usage

You can now preview how many credits each AI action will use.

You can use this preview to understand how many credits you’ll need to run a workflow at scale, with these simple 3 steps: 

1. Actions: Create a prototype app with sample data and inspect the credit preview for each AI action. 
2. Volume: Estimate the total volume of records that need to be processed in your workflow over a certain time period. 
3. Total: Multiply them together to estimate credits needed. 

For example, let’s estimate total credits needed for a customer data enrichment workflow. 

1. Actions: 

• AI Field 1: Summarize latest earnings call transcript (12 Credits)
• AI Field 2: Search the web and summarize recent company news (12 Credits)
• AI Field 3: Taking step 1 and 2 as input, generate discussion topics for upcoming meeting (1 Credit)

= 25 Credits / Customer Enrichment

2. Volume:

Number of customers to enrich per month: 1000

3. Total: 

Total estimated credits / month: 25,000

Approx total cost / month: $40

Cost per enrichment: $0.04

With the new credit consumption rates, you can scale up your AI workflows with marginal cost impact. 

What’s new in Airtable AI? 

In case you missed it, we also introduced Airtable Assistant this month. 

• Your personal app builder – Simply ask Assistant to build, modify, or add to any of your apps in Airtable.
• AI business answers – Ask any business question and get answers based on data in your Airtable apps.

Plus, Airtable AI now supports two new ways to bring structured data into your apps to power even more impactful workflows: 

• AI web search – Put thousands of web researchers to work across every row in your Airtable base.
• AI document analysis – Turn unstructured documents into data and workflows, at scale.

Get fully up to speed with what’s possible with Airtable AI by watching our latest livestream on-demand: 

Watch now

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

With AI bringing rapid disruption to every industry, companies need faster, simpler ways to deploy software to drive digital transformation.

AWS Marketplace answers this need, offering a frictionless way for companies to purchase and manage software using pre-approved budgets. It gives customers a unified view across all IT spend, and increases visibility into the different technologies teams are deploying across the org.

Airtable’s official listing on AWS Marketplace means that new customers will benefit from speedier procurement, simpler billing, and smoother operations. Their Airtable spend will now count toward an AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP)—a savings program designed for enterprise cloud customers.

“We’re thrilled to offer a more seamless buying experience for AWS customers who are looking to empower citizen developers to advance their missions” says Paul Ohls, Chief Revenue Officer at Airtable.

“Innovate faster, with greater governance”

The powerful combination of AWS + Airtable means customers can now expect:

Simplified procurement, incentives, and billing: Your Airtable spend now counts toward an AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP)—a savings program specifically built for enterprise cloud customers.  

Custom pricing and terms through private offers that include benefits like:

• Flexible pricing, terms, and payment options
• Speed and governance while procuring software
• Simplified AWS billing

Streamlined onboarding for AWS and Airtable customers: AWS customers can easily procure, deploy, and manage Airtable solutions to enhance their business operations.  Accessing Airtable through AWS Marketplace Private Offers simplifies your path to leveraging the leading AI-powered app building platform.

“The ability to consolidate software purchases under AWS, while leveraging existing EDP benefits, is a game-changer for organizations looking to optimize costs and drive efficiencies,” Ohls says.

“This approach not only simplifies vendor management but also allows companies to integrate Airtable seamlessly into their AWS environment, empowering teams to innovate faster and with greater governance.”

Simplifying the customer experience at scale

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that customers can use to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software and services. AWS Marketplace includes thousands of software listings from categories including security, business applications, machine learning, and data analysis.

Customers can quickly launch preconfigured software, and choose software solutions in Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), software as a service (SaaS), and other formats. You can use AWS Marketplace as a buyer (subscriber), seller (provider), or both. 

“Airtable and AWS are both focused on serving customers with innovation,” says Nelson Wang, Head of Partnerships at Airtable.

“The enormous reach of AWS means that more businesses are now going to be able to access Airtable’s AI-powered app building platform—designed to power their most critical business workflows.”

About Airtable

Airtable is the world’s leading digital operations platform used by 80% of the Fortune 100 including companies like AWS, Walmart, HBO, Levis, Vanguard, and Nike.

The world’s largest enterprises use Airtable to build customized apps for their most critical and unique workflows—from managing roadmaps to launching marketing campaigns to tracking job applicants.

When you’re ready to take your digital transformation to the next level, please check out our new AWS Marketplace listing to purchase and unlock Airtable access directly within AWS in the United States.

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

Today, AI is the latest seismic sea change accelerating digital disruption—promising to buoy the next generation of innovative “Netflixes” while sinking the “Blockbusters” in its roiling wake.

Every company is becoming a digital product company. The largest banks in the US now engage more people via digital apps than they ever did in branches. The largest apparel companies are selling directly to consumers through digital channels, in addition to physical retail. And recent research from Airtable, surveying 550 product leaders at enterprise companies, found that 92% of product leaders are responsible for revenue goals and performance metrics that extend far beyond the quantity and quality of features shipped.

Whether you’re leading Product at a bank, airline, retailer, or tech organization, the ability to deliver business impact through your digital products at scale is a core requirement for success. 

Unfortunately, many product leaders are not set up to deliver impact at the pace required of a quickly changing technology environment. Airtable’s research found that the average product manager spends 66% of their time on administrative tasks—and Product leaders are drowning in spreadsheets and powerpoints, as opposed to focusing on strategy and customers. 

Ultimately, to be successful, product organizations must be able to: 

• Synthesize customer truth with AI. Uncover new opportunities and solve customer problems faster by leveraging AI to parse mountains of customer data and translate customer insights into product strategy. 
• Translate headcount investment into business impact. Plan your roadmap with a unified view of every investment, across every team. Automate prioritization according to predicted impact, and keep teams focused on the work that matters most. 
• Accelerate all stages of the product development cycle. Use AI to automate tedious work across every stage of product development, such as automating status updates, searching legal checklists, and drafting support documentation. 

To meet this moment of ongoing transformation, product teams urgently need to change the way they think about and build digital products. That’s why we’re here to invite you to a game-changing product launch event to see what’s new from Airtable.

What changes do we need to make to our product-building operations to fully leverage AI?

To answer that specific and crucial question, Airtable is releasing a new product specifically designed for product teams, bringing powerful unification to your entire product life cycle. Join us on 10/16/2024  to learn more. 

Register now and reserve your spot!

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

They need to be able to deploy AI into critical processes, build customized applications to solve unique problems, and centralize security and governance. 

Today, Airtable is announcing new capabilities to help large organizations meet this moment of AI-accelerated opportunity. These features empower citizen developers, the people fully immersed in the needs of the business, to develop and deploy their own AI solutions at scale. 

What we’re launching:

Whether it’s to streamline digital product operations, deliver global marketing campaigns, or manage retail supply chains, Airtable’s enterprise-grade capabilities enable all business units to build and customize the applications they need, while preserving central governance. 

App Library

Historically, large companies have struggled to find the right balance between standardizing global processes and meeting the needs of every business unit. App Library is a way to resolve this tension: it’s a new home for custom-developed applications that can be adopted—and adapted—across an organization. 

Airtable administrators can package high-impact apps (embedded with AI and integrations) for business units to deploy. Individual functions can customize the apps to suit their own workflows, while preserving the locked-down core structure. 

App Library leverages leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and IBM watsonx, so administrators can standardize the right models for the right processes. It also allows administrators to maintain updates across all apps, centrally deploying changes for business users to accept. 

HyperDB

Decision making at large organizations is often hampered by siloed data living in disparate sources. Platforms such as Snowflake and Salesforce store highly critical information, but business units can’t always access this data to inform recurring workflows. 

Now, Airtable’s HyperDB allows companies to integrate data from platforms like Snowflake and Databricks, then build bespoke, AI-driven workflows on top of that information. All the while, administrators maintain governance of the data and ensure compliance to industry standards. 

With HyperDB, it’s possible to pull 100M+ records into Airtable, and operationalize that data across the organization. The result? Stronger decision making fueled by critical, cross-functional information. 

Other features announced today: Org branding, which allows companies to customize Airtable with their own branding and logos. And App Sandbox, which empowers builders to create, test, and customize no-code apps in a safe environment, before deployment. 

All features are designed to unlock agility across every business function, while maintaining enterprise-grade governance at scale. 

What is Airtable?

Airtable is the world’s leading digital operations platform used by 80% of the Fortune 100 including companies like AWS, Walmart, HBO, Levis, Vanguard, and Nike. Top companies leverage Airtable to empower teams to build their most important workflows across shared data and to supercharge efficiency and automations with Airtable AI.

Learn more at https://www.airtable.com/solutions/enterprise

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

The Summit focused on the latest trends, tools, and product strategies—with a particular emphasis on how AI is transforming product management workflows to help teams deliver better products to market, faster.

Anthony Maggio, VP of Product Management at Airtable, spoke at the event, sharing his vision for the future of product management and his perspective on the product landscape today. Anthony made three predictions for how AI will transform product strategy, reshape industry dynamics, and further elevate the role of Product Managers (PMs). His session also included actionable strategies for leveraging AI capabilities to drive innovation across the product development lifecycle. 

AI adoption is increasingly urgent for product leaders

For those gathered at yesterday’s CPO summit there was a shared sentiment that the confluence of digital transformation and rapidly expanding AI capabilities will have profound implications for their businesses. A feeling of urgency was palpable in the room as leaders shared examples of using AI to quickly parse mountains of customer feedback, unlock previously hidden insights, and optimize resourcing across different product teams.

What is our current macro environment?

The last decade has ushered in a new age of digital evolution with every single company offering some form of digital product. Traditional banks and major retailers like Bank of America, Nike, and Sam’s Club have fully embraced this digital shift. They’re innovating digital experience to improve customer satisfaction—you can chat in real time with financial experts via your phone’s Bank of America app; use GPS to track runs with friends in the Nike app; and enjoy 24/7 shopping with the Sam’s Club digital storefront.

Now, AI is accelerating digital product development even further: By lowering the barriers to entry, the latest generation of LLMs are creating unprecedented opportunities to build more effective products, by applying AI to create novel solutions to customer problems. 

Anthony has an intersectional vantage point of these industry-wide changes. First, as a software company building industry-leading AI products like their recently launched Airtable Cobuilder. And second, as a dedicated partner to CPOs across many industries who are actively leveraging Airtable’s no code platform to build and manage their own product development lifecycles. Anthony was clear that every role, across every industry, is going to be impacted by this change. And, because the coming innovations are developing so rapidly, he timeboxed his three predictions against a horizon of only three years into the future.

Three Predictions for the Future of Product 

Trend 1: AI will drive product strategy 

Anthony’s first prediction was that “AI powered product strategy will quickly become the norm.” Real-time data was once a double edged sword—amazing to have, but also overwhelming in volume and costly to analyze. Now, thanks to AI, this data is both containable and actionable.

Where previously, user research was outdated almost the moment it was written, now PMs can have a real-time pulse on the voice and sentiment of their customers at scale. That pulse empowers PMs to make decisions on where to invest resources for maximum impact. Anthony explained how product managers can input surveys, app store reviews, seller feedback, customer calls, and even community forum data and use AI to parse this mountain of information in minutes—as opposed to days or weeks.

Anthony predicts this is only the tip of the iceberg: AI will accelerate and strengthen every stage of the product development lifecycle. He highlighted that AI is making it easier and faster to generate product requirement briefs; to match roadmap initiatives to strategic goals; to send launch updates to the rest of the company; to manage resourcing and budget across multiple product teams; and to continuously improve the product experience.

Anthony acknowledges that changing processes is hard, especially at some of the largest enterprises, but he sees the most innovative product orgs as leaders in mandating top-down change. He predicts that these early adopters will reap the benefits with faster time-to-market and more impactful products that better solve customer pain points. On the flip side, companies that resist this opportunity will lose out and shrink in the face of rising, AI-driven agility.

It was clear to the product leaders in the room that it is incumbent upon them to push their teams with top-down emphasis to change the way they operate. And this change can’t merely be a performative or superficial one where a company bolts on a chatbot feature and starts calling themselves an AI business. Instead, to unlock true agility and innovation, product teams will have to meaningfully redefine their entire digital product strategy—embedding AI across internal operations and external customer experiences.

Trend 2: AI will accelerate category disruption cycles

Anthony predicts that AI will help teams solve previously unsolvable problems by fundamentally changing the user experience paradigms.

He told a story about overcoming the “blank slate” customer challenge at Airtable. Anthony explained that, as an open-ended platform where you can build any type of app, Airtable had a user activation challenge. The blank slate could be daunting if you didn’t generally understand the fundamentals of software development. 

He recounted how, over the last 3.5 years he watched many product teams attempt to increase new user activation by leveraging templates, and with assisted onboarding and pre-made apps. But there was a problem with all these approaches: they’d provide inspiration but they ultimately still required users to learn how to build apps with automations, databases, and UI. 

But now, with the latest LLMs, Airtable has solved this problem by leveraging AI to do all the app building. The team realized that the solution to making app building easier was by creating a fully conversational, language-based interface called Airtable Cobuilder that would allow anyone to create an app without needing any technical know-how at all. Now, all a user needs to do is describe their process and requirements and voilà, they’ll get an app in seconds.

Anthony explained that he’s asking his team to consider how they can better leverage AI to build more impactful products and solve even more customer problems with greater efficiency. He predicts that soon customers will expect AI solutions to be the norm, just like mobile became the norm as we untethered from the desktop. 

Again he stressed that agility and innovation were key, even predicting that companies that fail to adapt are going to be disrupted. Need more proof? Just look at the latest YC batch — he suggested, spotlighting that you’ll notice that nearly every new company is going after an incumbent category through AI transformation. Change is coming and companies will need to either disrupt themselves or be disrupted from the outside.

Trend 3: The rise of the “full stack” product manager

Anthony’s third prediction was perhaps the most personal for product practitioners. 

He asserted that the core responsibility of product managers has always been about creating impactful products that drive business value. And yet, in practice, teams often become overly focused on inward-facing “product development” resulting in a loss of their original mission to actually drive the business forward.

He predicts the days of simply throwing products over the fence to the go-to-market teams are numbered. Instead, Anthony believes that an emphasis on revenue accountability will strengthen this trend, noting how over the last decade product-led growth has spotlighted the role of product in driving user acquisition and conversion into paying customers. 

He reminded the audience that it was only last year when Airbnb’s Brian Chesky made waves by revealing that Airbnb had consolidated the roles of Product Management and Product Marketing, with PMs taking over ownership over not only the development of features, but also the marketing narrative, messaging, positioning, and overall business impact of those features.

He shared that Airtable recently updated the product org, with PM leaders taking accountability for revenue outcomes across the business. This radical shift required his product teams to adopt a whole new way of working, with PMs taking on a much deeper understanding of their competitive landscape and embedding them within individual deal cycles to really understand what was motivating individual buyers. The results? Profound. Anthony’s team has shipped more products and increased growth while working under this new operating model. 

AI will only accelerate this trend as it continues to streamline operations and provides the product function with more real-time access to data and customer insights. Anthony sees strategy ownership as a key evolution of this new full stack PM, and predicts that PMs will extend into marketing and go-to-market outcomes.

This redefined role will require a new kind of operating system for the product function. PMs will no longer just be living in OKRs and JIRA tickets, they’ll need to connect into upstream and downstream processes and systems such as Salesforce, Marketo, Snowflake and Databricks to truly understand how their products are being marketed, positioned, sold and used. 

The final takeaway? Product leaders need to begin equipping their teams with the skills and tools to take on increased business ownership and accountability. The crowd in the room seemed to agree as he wrapped his talk and was peppered with nearly a dozen questions in the first minute of his Q&A, many of which were asking for tactical advice on how to encourage AI adoption and experimentation at the enterprise level.

As product leaders left the Summit, making their way back down the peninsula or out to SFO, one takeaway was palpable: The product orgs they manage are all at the precipice of massive operational transformation. 

Airtable’s rising profile amongst product practitioners proves the platform is a clear and trusted guide to help CPOs navigate these disruptive waters. In the months ahead we’ll take note if product strategy increasingly relies on AI. We’ll look for evidence that AI is accelerating category disruption cycles. And finally we’ll track if a new full stack PM will emerge as both a technical product leader and a narrative marketing storyteller. Since our current innovation imperative waits for no one, we’ll be looking out for massive product transformations enabled by AI to continue apace.

What is Airtable?

Airtable is the world’s leading no code app platform used by 80% of the Fortune 100 including companies like AWS, Walmart, HBO, Levis, Vanguard, and Nike. Top companies leverage Airtable to empower teams to build their most important workflows across shared data and to supercharge efficiency and automations with Airtable AI.

Listening to Anthony outline his predictions for the future of product operations it was easy to see why Airtable has become such a strategic partner for CPOs at some of the world’s biggest brands. The company’s deep investment in AI is paying off and only accelerating their position as the leading no code apps platform as AI and digital transformation further takes over every corner of the market.

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

Today, we’re launching Airtable Cobuilder, the fastest way to build no-code applications. 

Describe what you want in words, and Cobuilder takes your idea from concept to reality, generating a customizable application in seconds. This simple no-code approach using natural language means that anyone can easily build and customize intuitive apps that transform their work. 

Unlocking the no-code revolution

Modern companies need custom applications that meet their unique business needs. But the status quo no longer cuts it: SaaS point solutions are brittle and siloed, and building traditional in-house software development is slow, expensive, and not flexible enough to adapt to quickly evolving company priorities.

The future is no-code. 

“Companies are already starting to move away from the traditional path of buying SaaS point solutions. Within the next five years, teams will build the vast majority of applications in-house, customizing them to transform their most critical workflows,” said our founder and CEO, Howie Liu. “But to get there, knowledge workers who are closest to the work need to be empowered to build their own apps, regardless of their technical level.”   

Access the no-code power of Airtable, instantly

AI is poised to drive a sea change in software as we know it today. On its own, AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for software development. When combined with no-code, it unlocks an entirely new era of application development – enabling the people working on your most critical workflows to become capable app builders in seconds with the assistance of a smart AI cobuilder.

Airtable Cobuilder combines the vast knowledge of today’s large language models (LLMs) with the accessibility of Airtable’s no-code app platform to bring net-new ideas to life. It leverages the knowledge these models have across industries, use cases, and business concepts to immediately translate your desired outcome into a very detailed app—that you can then customize and tweak with a simple click. 

• Effortless way to turn ideas into apps: Users can describe their idea to Airtable Cobuilder. Example: “I’m a director for the next Dune movie, and I need an app to manage my pre-production before filming begins in January 2025.” This generates a preview of a custom Airtable application in seconds, allowing teams to reimagine legacy workflows and experiment with new ways of working. 
• Leveraging the power of AI: The power of Airtable Cobuilder rests in its ability to leverage the latest generation of LLMs to build extremely personalized apps. When users provide additional details like the company they work for or project they’re working on (Dune), function (Director), specific requirements they need (lead up to January 2025), or describe the workflow they’re trying to build (manage film’s pre-production), Cobuilder is able to generate a highly-specific and unique app – one that leverages the knowledge base of LLMs.
• Cobuilding with AI: One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to business apps. After initial generation, users have the ability to preview the app and make any needed adjustments to suit their exact needs. This is where no-code shines: instead of needing a developer to review, debug, and edit code to make changes, anyone can edit the app. You can focus less on building, and more on customizing, automating, and enabling the work that matters. 
• Data privacy and security: Airtable protects the privacy and security of customers’ data. No customer data is used to train current or future LLMs. 
• More to come: Instant, no-code app building with Cobuilder is just the beginning. We are building towards a world where Cobuilder allows you to make all kinds of app customizations and automations as you get deeper into the work: ask Cobuilder to add a new base populated with supplied content, generate insights at scale, build a timeline to track deadlines, and more.

Describe the app you need. Let Cobuilder do the rest. 

While Airtable is designed to be easy to use, starting from scratch can feel daunting – and new builders still sometimes struggle to uncover the platform’s full power when they first start building applications.

Cobuilder makes it possible for anyone to go from an initial idea to the full first draft of an app without any effort. This not only accelerates time-to-value for each use, but also increases the number of useful apps that can be created within an organization. And, best of all, apps built with Cobuilder carry the same value of any app made with Airtable—consistent, best-in-class interfaces for the end user, structured underlying data, and logic and automations. 

Additional prompt examples include:

• “I need to launch a women’s skateboarding shoe in time for the Olympics.”
• “Help me track renovations of our boutique hotels in Marrakesh.”
• “I need to track the parts and production schedule for the Artemis Mission SLS rocket system.”

During our beta, we saw widespread adoption amongst customers within the media, tech, financial services, and retail industries. Thousands of applications were built using Cobuilder, marking the beginning of a new era for app development and no-code AI. And most importantly, 9 out of 10 times the AI generated something useful and impactful, as validated by in-product feedback during the Cobuilder beta. 

“Airtable’s mission has been to empower new generations of builders to create the apps they need to run their business. We pioneered a way for citizen developers across teams to build apps that are simple to create, intuitive to use, and customizable to any business need. That’s why builders have created over 50M apps with Airtable to-date,” said Liu. “AI is now massively accelerating our ability to deliver on this mission. Cobuilder represents an entirely new and distinct set of capabilities around AI building that empowers anyone to turn an idea into reality in seconds.”

Cobuilder capabilities will grow over time, like the ability to incorporate existing data sets at the app generation stage; chat support that can make adjustments and edit your app at any stage in the process on your behalf; and a smart developer assistant for users. 

Transform your work with new Airtable AI capabilities

Airtable is continuing to invest in AI across every aspect of the platform. In addition to Airtable Cobuilder, we are launching new Airtable AI features to help teams operationalize AI into their data and workflows, enabling customers to realize the transformative promise of AI in every department.  

• Doc extraction: Users can now use Airtable AI to extract information from PDF documents, allowing them to leverage key data in their workflows. Later this year, this functionality will support additional document types such as images, presentations, text and audio files.  
• Internet search and browse: Users will soon be able to use AI to pull in data from public internet pages and searches, enriching their Airtable data and streamlining time-consuming research.
• New models: Airtable AI allows customers to choose which AI platforms and model developers to utilize based on their needs and preferences. Today, we support the OpenAI GPT models, Anthropic’s Claude models via Amazon Bedrock, and IBM’s Granite and Meta’s Llama 3 models via IBM watsonx. Airtable will continue to offer additional platforms and models to give customers an even wider breadth of choice. 

Next week, our CEO will deliver a live webcast on Tuesday, July 30th at 10:30 AM PT to share more about Cobuilder and our vision for no-code moving forward. 

Airtable’s Cobuilder is available to new and existing customers today. New users will be prompted to create a free account. To try it for free, visit https://www.airtable.com/platform/app-building.

–

Airtable is the no-code app platform that empowers people closest to the work to accelerate their most critical business processes. Across every industry, leading enterprises trust Airtable to power workflows in product operations, marketing operations, citizen developer “no code”, and more – all with the power of AI built-in. More than 500,000 organizations, including 60% of the Global 2000, rely on Airtable for collaborative work management and citizen development to help transform how work gets done. 

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

Technology is a funny thing. On one hand, technology unlocks limitless possibilities across every aspect of our lives. It allows us to do crazy things like fly across the world in a matter of hours, or make mindblowing movies and video games. But, just as our dependence on technology has increased over the last hundred years, our ability to access and proactively use it to solve our own problems has declined. 

Our tools have gotten more complicated as they’ve become more specialized—and, in many organizations, technology is owned and operated by the few instead of the many. But this growing distance between people and tools is diminishing productivity at companies of all sizes—problems are solved fastest by the people actually facing them.

It turns out that technology—like a lot of tools—is more useful when everyone can use it.

Everyone knew how to operate a hammer

Hammers didn’t require an instruction manual or special two-week certification course. Hammers were universally understood. Software is not. Hammers could be wielded equally by everyone. Software couldn’t. With the rise of software as our dominant tool, we’ve grown more estranged from the very tools we created to empower ourselves in the first place.

Airtable wants to change this reality. The more that non-technical people understand how to use the Airtable platform, the more folks will have the tools they need to get their jobs done. It’s why today we’re putting the tools back in the hands of the doers; we’re giving the power back to the makers and the problem solvers.

Introducing the Airtable Academy

We built the Airtable Academy for one simple reason. To empower citizen developers and non-technical teams to build custom workflows and solve critical problems, without relying on overwhelmed IT departments or overtaxed engineering teams. After all, nobody knows more about how to get your job done than you.

Your new Academy features a huge catalog of self-paced, on-demand content, including:

• More than a dozen courses on topics for both new and proficient users
• Product quickstarts on things like Airtable AI and the Admin Panel
• Role-based learning paths for end-users and builders
• On-demand recordings of webinars, user guides

And, because nobody values a job well done more than the builders themselves, we’ve also launched the Airtable Builder Certification status badge. Now, power users can test their knowledge and skills and receive an official certification that they’ve passed the program. This is a badge for you to share with your networks and post on your LinkedIn to demonstrate your increased value as an employee who makes things happen. 

Airtable Academy is available right now to enterprise Airtable customers. 

You don’t have to be an engineer to build apps anymore

We think the people in the trenches should call the shots because nobody else has the same insights that you do. Just imagine what could be possible when a HR manager at a global investment firm, or when a product designer at a leading tech company, or when a production lead at a world-renowned entertainment group can finally design the way they work for themselves.

What if they could see a problem and immediately fix it, without relying on IT or clogging the builder backlog? It would be revolutionary. These newly empowered no-code technologists will solve problems quickly, identify and address inefficiencies more proactively, and get the right candidate, the right product, the next streaming hit to market faster than ever before.

Airtable encourages improvisation and human ingenuity. It’s a platform purposefully designed to be as flexible, and modular, and extensible as the various realities teams face daily. Now, with the Airtable Academy, every person, on every team, will be able to proactively solve problems and unlock new levels of efficiency and impact. 

After many months of building ourselves, we’re excited to invite enterprise customers to the Airtable Academy. Please, take a look around your shiny new e-learning and credentialing program. We can’t wait to see what you build.

Register now for free at academy.airtable.com

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Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

If you’re in marketing, you’re accustomed to the “do more with less” mantra. But the pressure to deliver on revenue goals and prove strategic impact has never been more pronounced. Facing growing expectations from across the org, as well as urgency from emerging technologies like AI, marketing leaders are juggling a handful of operational and executional priorities. 

But there are commonalities in teams who are thriving in this environment of constant change. In a recent survey of more than 550 marketing leaders, we found that, despite the prevailing narrative of resource scarcity, the real challenge for marketers in 2024 isn’t constrained budgets or lean teams. Instead, it is the effective utilization of existing resources and the ability to measure (and prove) return on investments.

Our research found that connecting information between tools, teams, and workflows is essential to optimizing resources and accelerating ROI. And that the most successful marketing teams build upon this connection with razor-sharp focus and enduring flexibility. 

This five-minute read will give you a high-level overview of some key findings. For the full story, download the report here.

1. Marketing teams are expected to significantly contribute to business revenue 

Marketing leaders are facing mounting pressure to contribute to the organization’s revenue goals. Eighty-eight percent of marketing leaders are now responsible for meeting a revenue goal, up from 79% the previous year. This highlights the growing expectation for marketing teams to impact the bottom line directly.

Despite this, marketing leaders are struggling with decreased visibility into ROI. Only 25% of marketing leaders report very high ROI visibility, a decline from 33% the previous year. This is a challenge for marketing teams responsible for driving revenue, as they’re struggling to accurately measure their efforts’ effectiveness, which poses a significant challenge for growth.

The primary reason is that most marketing leaders work in silos and run into friction collaborating with other departments. A lack of centralized data means that individual departmental goals are often prioritized over working toward a common objective, hindering the organization’s overall progress.

To overcome this, marketing teams must foster collaboration and alignment across marketing functions with other departments, such as sales and customer support. 

Marketing operations consultant, Laura Camila Rivera states, “When a marketing strategy is shaped by collective input, it not only becomes more robust but also garners widespread support across the organization.”

2. Beyond content generation, AI plays a broader role in accelerating marketing work

Certainly, generative AI’s content creation capabilities have garnered significant attention. But this report shows how AI is streamlining operations across the entire marketing supply chain—from planning and production to distribution and measurement. 

• Sixty-six percent of marketing leaders leverage AI to parse data and facilitate better insights.
• Sixty-one percent of marketing leaders use AI to improve asset usage and ROI. 
• Moreover, 59% of marketing leaders use AI to brainstorm ideas that drive customer loyalty, and 56% use it to scale content generation while lowering costs.

AI’s ability to analyze large datasets and discover hidden insights helps marketers make data-driven decisions and allocate resources more effectively. Marketing leaders also recognize AI’s potential to accelerate production and optimize asset usage.

In fact, our research shows that teams who use AI in everyday work are significantly more likely to consistently meet revenue goals, compared to those who only use AI a moderate amount or not at all. 

3. The most efficient teams automate manual work and sync data between tools 

Today, when everything is scattered across different software, automation is the holy grail for anyone who wants to do more with less. 

Eighty-eight percent of marketing leaders say they must increase their use of AI and automation to meet customer expectations and stay competitive. And marketing teams with “mostly” or “completely” automated processes for syncing data between tools are more likely to meet deadlines and achieve revenue goals, compared to teams with manual processes. 

Check out how Eric Doty, Content lead at Dock—automates multiple processes with Zapier and Airtable. 

4. Martech overload is threatening visibility into ROI

Marketing leaders often invest heavily in martech tools with the expectation that such tools will improve visibility into ROI. 

Our research reveals that two-thirds (67%) of leaders reported a 20% to 50% increase in software and technology expenditure over the last year, while only 8% reported reduced spend. 

Despite this significant investment, just 25% of marketing leaders have high visibility into ROI, down from 33% the previous year.

The complexity of the martech landscape is a significant contributor to this problem. Marketing teams use an average of 19 different tools in everyday work, leading to data duplication and siloed work. 

Forty-three percent of respondents said that between 30% and 50% of their team’s data is duplicated across multiple platforms, such as spreadsheets, documents, and apps. This fragmentation hinders marketing leaders’ ability to view their efforts comprehensively and accurately measure ROI.

Moreover, supporting research shows that Martech tools are often underutilized, with 77% of B2B marketers reporting redundancies in their tech stack. This wastes valuable resources and contributes to the siloing of information and insights, making it even more challenging to prove the impact of marketing initiatives.

If you’re interested in learning more about the opportunities and challenges facing marketing teams, download the full report. Or, to see how Airtable helps marketers adapt quickly and solidify their role within organizations, watch our video on the marketing supply chain.

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

There’s a lot of upside to large-scale product teams—big teams benefit from specialized skill sets, deep institutional knowledge, and the horsepower to deliver major impact. But size doesn’t insulate your team from the fundamental pressure of product delivery. In fact, when budgets or timelines are tight, larger teams can face more scrutiny, not less.

In a survey of over 700 large product teams (all with between 200 and 1,300 team members), we asked which parts of the product lifecycle are most painful. We found that for large teams, bigger datasets and multiplying tools lead to wider blindspots, disconnected processes, and less reliable sources of truth.

Here are the commonly-cited challenges our respondents identified—and concrete actions you can take to solve them.

#5: Setting and aligning on goals and objectives

Setting ambitious-yet-achievable goals is challenging for every team; for large product teams, this often comes down to visibility and prioritization (more on the latter in the next section). 36% of our surveyed teams said they find goal-setting difficult—and only 53% said they have high visibility into goals and objectives. All of this can have serious downstream effects. Without visibility, teams often lose sight of the bigger picture, and struggle to make smart decisions—or live up to their full potential.

If this sounds familiar, check out the following tips and resources to set better-aligned, more visible goals.

Tips for setting product team goals and objectives

• Centralize objectives for maximum visibility. A strong goal-setting process is both centralized and empowering—allowing individual teams to design their own unique workflows around your OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Consider a tops-down model where objectives are managed centrally by product ops, and then used to shape plans for individual product teams. This also makes it easy to give stakeholders real-time visibility into progress against those OKRs. Learn more about writing effective OKRs or check out Chapter 9 (“Setting and aligning on product objectives”) in the Product Ops Playbook.
• Team up with your GTM partners. If hitting your goals depend on a key partner—often the marketing team—you should set those objectives together. If you’re planning a launch, for example, propose and align with Marketing on responsibilities, KPIs, check-ins, and shared surface areas for launch tracking. Read more about building better partnerships between Product and Marketing.
• Report on progress. Once objectives are defined and locked, use your roadmap to share regular progress updates against them. If you’re using Airtable or an OKR tracking software, you can automate OKR status updates to stakeholders, visualize OKR progress over time with reporting apps, or create custom, interactive interfaces to share high-level insights. Learn how Blackrock ties strategic goals to product features and keeps work on track.

#4: Managing your product roadmap

More than a third of the teams we surveyed said they struggle to manage their product roadmaps, calling the process “highly challenging.” Given that your roadmap is the heart of everything your team does, and the keeper of a product team’s most valuable information, this statistic is…not good.

But it’s also not a huge surprise. Large product teams are more likely to be juggling complex layers of stakeholders, unclear or competing priorities, multiple products and subproducts, and an overall lack of visibility. Disconnected, duplicative, out-of-date roadmaps lead to slow product development, missed insights, poor coordination, and ultimately a lack of trust in your team to deliver.

When it comes to prioritizing your roadmap, even teams with abundant resources need to be surgical. To make meaningful investments, teams need to strike a balance between the drive to move things forward, and the ability to pivot quickly as you encounter new information.

Questions to help your product team manage competing priorities

• Strategic value: Does this product investment align with the long-term product vision and near-term company strategy?
• Compounding potential for customers: Does this problem get worse, or create worse experiences for customers over time, if we fail to address it? Or on the flip side: does the value of solving this problem compound for customers over time?
• Your portfolio of product “bets”: Do you have a balance of payoff periods in terms of customers realizing value? Do you have a balance of investments that will GA this half, this year, next year?

Learn more about prioritization in “Rules of the roadmap: An expert-led guide”

#3 Analyzing and reporting on results

There’s no one way that product teams measure progress—monthly or daily active users, market position based on third-party ratings, or even customer retention. In our research, only 29% of product teams said they “almost always” hit their goals, but it’s clear that the issues start even further up the chain: understanding their results in the first place. 39% of large product teams said they struggled to analyze and report on their impact.

Failure to solve challenge comes with big consequences, especially for larger teams. If your team spends significant hours cobbling together reports from different tools, or manually compiling progress updates, they’re diverted from the most mission critical work. If you struggle to report your impact to your customers and company leadership, your team’s credibility suffers. And most fundamentally: if you don’t know what isn’t working, you won’t know how to fix it.

How to transform product data into insights

• Illuminate your blindspots. If you’re on a large team that struggles to measure their impact, visibility might be the culprit. Big companies tend to have lots of ways to measure performance, but struggle to visualize the full journey, identify gaps, and surface the right information to decision makers. If you’re using Airtable, you can sync datasets from your other systems of record (like Jira or Salesforce) directly into your interfaces and bases.
• Empower your decision-makers. Product leaders are often asked to make big, highly impactful decisions—without the luxury of time. LinkedIn was able to double capacity to report on results and demonstrate ROI to executives, which led to faster decision making and more time to conduct studies. Read more about how LinkedIn increased their speed.

#2 Collecting and acting on customer feedback

Every product team wants to be closer to their customers, and deliver products those customers love. At large companies, you’re dealing with a high volume of feedback from a complex mix of sources—and you need a scalable system to bring it all together.

Almost 40% of the large product teams we surveyed said that this process was very challenging, and it’s no wonder why. To start, you need to bring as much of your key insights as possible into the same place—including internal product feedback, feedback from customer-facing teams, research studies and data insights, and inputs from your community or customer advisory board. Beyond that, you need to translate that feedback into feedback your team can actually act on.

Ways to make customer feedback actionable

• Centralize your product insights. Prioritizing your team’s work is never easy, but visible, robust insights make big decisions easier. Dan Cunningham of Aladdin Wealth estimates that the company’s 130 client managers and product team members save nearly 600 hours a month on product communications by building a centralized product feedback app. Read about how BlackRock and Aladdin Wealth centralized insights in Airtable.
• Look beyond what your customers explicitly ask for. Customers’ feedback is heavily shaped by your product’s current limitations; it’s the Product team’s job to bring new ideas to the table, and to take calculated risks on innovative product investments. While it’s important to learn what customers believe they need, your team also needs to think beyond it. Learn about building insights-focused product teams in this on-demand webinar.

#1 Managing product launches

Finally, the most commonly cited delivery challenge: product launches.

Over 40% of the large product teams we surveyed said that managing product launches was “highly challenging”—and only 1 in 4 said they “almost always” ship their products on time.

Internal perception of your product teams (and external perception of your company) revolves around their ability to ship—your team works hard throughout the entire product lifecycle, but their credibility often comes down to a handful of major launch days. These efforts take massive cross-functional coordination—especially with your GTM partners on the marketing side.

But when that coordination is less than stellar, your whole team feels the pain. Planning gets siloed across countless tools, docs, and presentations; progress is nearly impossible to track; and on the day-of, you aren’t confident in what, or how, you’ll deliver. Your team can’t see—and proactively address—risks ahead of time, and when launch day is over, no one is sure whether it was a “success.”

Tips to deliver better products, faster

• Strengthen your most important partnership. Learn how to transform launch days with deep cross-functional collaboration.
• Double-down on company-wide orchestration with a single source of truth. Take a cue from retail group Kamai Osman Jamjoom Group (KOJ), who accelerated product velocity, halfing the time it takes launch a new brand. Here’s how they launched their sister brand in record time.
• Don’t skimp on retrospectives. Bake in time for retrospectives after every launch. Review the performance of both Marketing and Product activities surrounding your launch, so you can make continuous (and data-backed) feedback part of your shared culture. Learn how to centralize your product launch retros in Airtable.

Want to see how product teams at Netflix, Shopify, and Amazon transform their work with Airtable? Watch the demo: How Product leaders drive operational excellence.

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - simplify teamwork, customise workflows, and centralise data. Whether you’re a small business owner, a project manager, or a creative professional, Airtable offers a versatile solution for managing data and collaborating effectively. It's like a performance enhanced excel.

When work is hidden within different tools, and workflows don’t match up between teams, your employees are pulled into a haze of messages, emails, and repetitive conversations. Opportunities for collaboration almost always go unnoticed, and it’s impossible to achieve stronger outcomes at scale.

Solving these problems was front and center at our recent Leaders Forum in San Francisco, where Howie Liu, Airtable’s CEO, positioned the Airtable Connected Apps Platform as a way for companies to connect workflows, share data, and deepen trust between teams.

“Siloed data, misalignment between departments, and disconnected processes restrain organizations from moving quickly and in lock step,” Howie said in his Keynote. “Companies not only need apps that are customized and functional at a team level—they need apps that are connected, organization-wide, to bridge the fractures that threaten their future success.”

With this in mind, here’s how connected apps are transforming companies in every industry—from BlackRock, a multi-national investment company, to Riot Games, a video game developer, publisher and tournament organizer.

1. Curating a beautiful online storefront at Pottery Barn

At Pottery Barn, a furniture and decor store, the online experience is just as beautifully curated as the physical storefronts. But when Angela Williams, director of Creative Services, started her role, there wasn’t a clear process for organizing, planning, and approving product pages before they hit the website.

By sharing data and information between copywriters, ecommerce merchants, production artists, and digital designers, Angela has been able to streamline and scale the way product pages are published. With all metadata and relevant information in a centralized repository from the outset, the team has more time to review and optimize every piece of information before it enters testing.

“At the end of the day, we’re trying to please our customers and we need to have time to look at the product from their point of view. Airtable has made our lives easier. It’s connected everybody together so we can all work on something at the same time,” says Angela. “Connection means speed, it means efficiency, it means fewer mistakes. It means a nicer product at the end of the day for the customer.”

2. Delivering more surprising experiences at Riot Games

Riot Games is on a mission to develop, publish, and support games globally. You might have heard of League of Legends, a title the company first debuted in 2006 that has gone on to become the most-played PC game in the world. The Riot Games team uses Airtable to sync data and information about campaigns, results, and resourcing.

Sharing this data has illuminated trends in employee engagement, and has helped leadership focus the team on what they do best—developing, publishing, and promoting groundbreaking video games. “For Riot games, shared data means an incredible fan experience,” says Kate Lilly Rella, director of business operations for IP Strategy at Riot Games. “If we’re all connected, the fans get surprises and delight at every turn. Airtable has worked well for us. It makes what feels like an impossible task—managing all these disconnected pieces of information—possible.”

3. Driving cross-team collaboration at BlackRock

The team at Aladdin Wealth, part of BlackRock, is building a product that financial advisors use to help more people experience financial well-being. The team of product marketers and developers built an app in Airtable that connects technologists and senior stakeholders internally so that they can work together more efficiently on product management, business development, engineering, design, and product marketing. (This doesn’t include any client data or personal identifiable information, only internal project information.)

“Airtable frees up 80 hours a week of our product marketing team’s time,” said Dan Cunningham, senior product director for Aladdin Wealth. This leads to tighter release schedules and a faster deployment of new features to clients. Dan says, “since using Airtable to communicate our product updates we’ve really seen faster time-to-market.”

Transparency is key to all the work being done at Aladdin Wealth to ensure clients know what features are available to them. Airtable keeps Aladdin Wealth team members up-to-date internally on product launches. “As a global team, it’s complicated to keep everyone in the loop, Airtable really helps us stay in the loop,” Dan says.

4. Giving employees the confidence to act at BlueOcean

At BlueOcean, the team is building a software solution to help companies make more holistic and informed decisions across their marketing strategy—whether it’s sustaining growth, cutting spend, or future-proofing a brand.

As a start up, knowing where employees are spending their time is a matter of survival, says Jenny Bodenlos, head of enterprise program management at BlueOcean. “It is an absolute necessity that we really understand what everybody is taking action on and how those actions will help enable our strategy.”

The company uses Airtable to ensure that every team—sales, marketing, customer success—are rallied around the same data. All employees can see, in real time, how the product is progressing, and this visibility means that they’re ready to convey new features to customers quickly. Jenny says: “Shared data at BlueOcean really means giving people the confidence to act. Connection is everything. It allows us to come together as a collective to achieve a mission that we couldn’t do on our own.”

5. Offering leadership the full picture at Benchling

Benchling is a cloud-based platform for biotechnology research and development. The platform itself gives researchers a place to capture, standardize, and centralize data. A similar effort is underway internally at Benchling to make sure the product team, go-to-market team, and leadership team are fully aligned around the same information.

By sharing data between teams and making customer feedback more transparent in a centralized location, Ian Fischer, product operations manager at Benchling, has strengthened connection and collaboration across the org. Data was duplicated within siloed integrations and spreadsheets. Now, that data is fully visible to all key stakeholders, increasing its richness and making decisions more impactful.

“Having a centralized place for everyone to see the data has really improved the robustness of that data because people are more willing to interact with it,” says Ian. “With Airtable I’m able to surface insights to our leadership team showing them which customers are impacted by different releases on the roadmap.”

6. Bringing together industry visionaries at Scale AI

Scale AI is on a mission to accelerate innovation in AI and, being at the forefront of this cutting edge space, the team is in a unique position to share their insights and expertise with the world. This thought leadership culminates at the Scale TransformX Conference, which brings together AI leaders, visionaries, and researchers from several industries.

Planning TransformX involves input from the entire organization, and the team at Scale AI uses Airtable to connect data around speakers, budget, invoices, vendors, campaigns, branding, sales enablement, and more. With 120 speakers and 300+ hours of recording, it’s critical that every employee has the most accurate information at their fingertips.

“Being able to connect data across teams has been life changing,” says Marcel Santilli, head of marketing at Scale AI. “If we invite an executive, and their title changes, for example, we’re able to update the information in one place and know that their contact information is up-to-date in every other record across the org.”

By connecting this critical information in a single source of truth, a core team of just 14 people at Scale AI was able to pull off a three-day event last October, successfully drawing more than 30,000 attendees in-person and virtually. “Shared data for us means less friction in how we get work done, fewer mistakes, less manual work, and it means we can move faster and create more value,” Marcel says.

Whether it’s investing money around the world, producing groundbreaking video games, growing a software startup, or fast-tracking biolife experiments, these customers show the power of connecting data and information between teams.

A connected apps platform gives every stakeholder access to up-to-date information in real time, strengthening decision making and accelerating output across the organization. To learn more about connected apps, hear from Ilan Frank, VP of Product at Airtable, on the benefits of sharing data and consolidating SaaS at enterprise organizations.

If Airtable is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

Credit: Original article published here.