🛠️How Airtable Became the AI-Native App Company
Plus: Would you send your kids to an AI School?
How Airtable Became the AI-Native App Company
In June 2025, Airtable reintroduced itself not just as a no-code platform but as an AI-native operating system for business apps, powered by agentic automation. This wasn't a feature update. It was a refounding. At the center of this shift is Omni, Airtable’s new AI agent that designs, builds, edits, and analyzes data across applications. This is to give users AI-powered superpowers.
Before AI-Native Airtable
The Refounding in 2025
Launched Omni: an agentic app builder that generates fully usable apps from natural language.
Turned Airtable into a parts bin: prebuilt components for data, logic, security, and UI—ready for Omni to assemble.
Shifted the default user experience: every new user now lands in the AI-native version of Airtable, across all plans.
This is a builder-led transformation—custom software is no longer the exception, it’s the new default.
— Howie Liu, CEO
What Is Omni?
Omni is more than a chatbot. It’s a full-stack AI agent with enterprise awareness:
Conversational App Builder: Builds or edits apps via plain English (e.g., “create a CRM for B2B SaaS with stages, notes, and alerts”)
Data Interpreter: Understands uploaded notes, transcripts, and feedback, can tag, classify, and analyze in seconds.
System-Wide Agent: Omni respects user permissions, performs tasks within shared apps, and automates full workflows.
Real-World Use Cases
1. Creative Campaign Builder
Teams upload a campaign brief.
Omni instantly builds a project board with campaign concepts, mockups, social assets, and channel-specific variations.
What once took 6 weeks with agencies now happens in under 1 hour.
2. Sales Intelligence System
Sales call transcripts stream into Airtable.
Omni extracts feature requests, objections, and buying signals.
Additional agents research competitors and build out strategy docs automatically.
3. Massive AI Analysis at Scale
Use case: An investor wants to analyze 10,000 startup profiles.
Airtable + Omni allows users to apply AI prompts to every row and trigger follow-ups as new companies are added, no manual copy-paste.
The Breakthrough: From AI Features to AI Systems
Airtable’s competitive edge isn’t just conversational UI, it’s operational AI.
Apps can chain together multiple AI actions, layered with business logic.
Human + AI collaboration is native.
AI doesn’t just react—it runs processes.
Chat is good for one-offs. But scaling AI work needs apps with memory, structure, and automation.
Impact So Far (Mid-2025)
Metric Result AI adoption 100% of new users onboard into AI-native flow Time saved Creative, sales, and ops teams report 60–90% time reduction in core processes AI agents launched Thousands of daily agent tasks across enterprise use cases Business model New AI credits included in every plan, even free.
Drawbacks
What This Means for the Industry
Zero-cost app building - infinite app creation.
Agentic AI as infrastructure - businesses automate operations without devs.
Builder-led transformation - domain experts, not engineers, build enterprise tools.
Airtable redefined how apps are built, how they run, and who builds them.
This AI-native transformation proves that the next evolution in software isn’t about more features, it’s about fewer barriers. Omni gives every business the ability to build, automate, and evolve with AI in the loop.