By AIM · AIM Media House
When a viral tweet two years ago declared “Airtable is dead,” CEO Howie Liu remembers being stunned, not by the claim itself, but by how far and fast it spread. “They literally had incorrect numbers by a strong multiple on what our revenue scale was,” Liu recalled in a recent interview with Lenny's Podcast.
“And yet this particular tweet went super viral.” For Liu, the moment crystallized something about how narratives, true or not, move faster than facts. It was a lesson in the power of speed, something he’s now trying to harness as he reorients Airtable into an AI-native company.
“Refounding” Airtable Liu describes the AI era as so transformative that “every software product in my opinion has to be refounded.” For him, that meant stepping back into the weeds, even into the code, in what he and peers call the “IC-CEO” model: chief executives who act like individual contributors again.
“AI is such a paradigm shift… with every new model release, it actually implies novel form factors and novel UX patterns to be invented,” Liu said.
“To be continuously relevant, you have to be in the details.” “I take pride in being the number one most expensive inference-cost user of Airtable AI.” That return to details has reshaped Airtable’s product.
The company has rolled out Omni, a conversational builder that lets users describe the app they want and watch as Airtable generates it. It has also launched AI Field Agents: agents that live inside customer apps to run tasks like research, analysis, or automation.
And its new storage layer, HyperDB, supports up to 100 million records, making the platform viable for enterprise-scale deployments. Liu reorganized Airtable’s engineering and product teams into what he calls “fast thinking” and “slow thinking” groups.
The fast group, officially the AI Platform team, ships capabilities at what he hopes is a near-weekly cadence.
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