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- How Airtable Became the AI-Native App Company
How Airtable Became the AI-Native App Company
Who is Bankrolling AI Training for Teachers?
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All companies are pivoting to AI, but not all of them are succeeding. We’ve been tracking the standouts, and after sharing our Duolingo case study, we’re now diving into how Airtable became an AI-first company, including the pros and cons of that shift. As AI becomes more embedded in everyday life, would you send your kids to an AI-powered school? And more importantly, who’s funding the training of tomorrow’s AI-ready teachers? Let’s explore.
How Airtable Became the AI-Native App Company
📰 News and Trends.
Would you send your kids to an AI School?
🧰 AI Tools - Note Taking
Who is Bankrolling AI Training for Teachers?
🧠 Learning Corner - Fastchat Arena
📰 AI News and Trends
Germany Moves to Block AI App DeepSeek Over Unlawful Data Transfers to China
Player's faith in technology shaken by AI line-calling at Wimbledon
Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs has grand ambitions to ‘solve all diseases’ with AI. Now, it’s gearing up for its first human trials
OpenAI is dramatically increasing its employee stock compensation to defend against rival Meta's poaching. Other companies should follow suit, as Apple has now lost talent to Meta’s poaching efforts.
xAI will hold a livestream for the Grok 4 release on Wednesday at 8 PM PT.
A new experimental ChatGPT feature called "Study Together" encourages more interactive learning by prompting users with questions instead of direct answers.
Replit introduced Dynamic Intelligence for its Agent, adding three capabilities: Extended Thinking, High Power Model, and Web Search
🌐 Other Tech news
Jack Dorsey launches a WhatsApp messaging rival built on Bluetooth
Waymo robotaxis are heading to Philadelphia and NYC
Threads now has almost as many daily active users as X.
TikTok Building New Version of App Ahead of Expected U.S. Sale
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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.
🧠 Learning Corner.
Fastchat Arena (by LMSYS) A hands-on playground for comparing and interacting with top open-source and proprietary LLMs.
Learn by chatting with multiple AI models side-by-side
Great for observing differences in reasoning, style, and accuracy
Includes popular models like Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, Mixtral, LLaMA, and more
Would you send your kids to an AI School?

Alpha School is an experimental private school using a “2-Hour Learning” model powered by AI, aiming to deliver core academics in just two hours per day, claiming up to 2.6× faster learning.
The school, run by Unbound Academy, targets high-IQ students and emphasizes mastery-based progression, personalized pacing, and data-driven feedback. Students engage in focused learning bursts with real-time dashboards tracking their performance and engagement. While the approach is innovative and tech-enhanced, the model’s true effectiveness is still unproven due to potential selection bias and a lack of independent studies. It shows promise, but remains an elite and experimental educational experiment.
Who is Bankrolling AI Training for Teachers?

Even if you we think taking your kids to an AI shool this is a bad idea, all education is under going major transformation. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic are funding a new National Academy for A.I. Instruction in New York City, led by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), with $23 million to help educators integrate AI into the classroom.
The goal is to train teachers on how to use tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Khanmigo to streamline tasks such as lesson planning and email writing, while ensuring responsible, ethical use. Microsoft will contribute $12.5M, OpenAI $10M, and Anthropic $500K. This move is part of a broader push by Big Tech to shape the role of AI in education and reflects growing public-private partnerships. Researchers have raised concerns about misinformation, turning kids into lifelong users of AI, reduced critical thinking, and exploitation in AI training data.
Despite these risks, early workshops have shown promise in helping teachers become more efficient, potentially reshaping classroom workflows, but is it better for students?
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