Airtable CEO Howie Liu is doing what most bosses wouldn’t: He wants employees to take more time off for play.
Specifically, to play with AI, Liu says, and add more tools to their kit.
Liu, 36, said in an episode of Lenny’s Podcast that aired on Sunday that he has been encouraging his employees to play around with AI as part of their work.
“If you want to cancel all your meetings for a day or for an entire week and just go play around with every AI product that you think could be relevant to Airtable, go do it. Period,” Liu said.
“That’s the most important thing. Play. Experimentation,” he added.
Representatives for Airtable did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Liu said on the podcast that he takes pride in being the “No. 1 most expensive in inference-cost user of Airtable AI,” the company’s AI service. Liu added that he was a top user of Airtable AI, “not just within our company” but “globally across all our customers.”
Liu described his AI usage as “extremely, intentionally wasteful.” For instance, Liu said he would spend hundreds of dollars on inference costs just to have AI generate insights based on sales call transcripts.
“Hundreds of dollars spent on this exercise is trivial compared to the potential strategic value of having better insights,” Liu said.
“That’s invaluable, right? You could pay a consulting firm literally millions of dollars to get that quality of work,” he added.
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Liu is one of many tech CEOs who aggressively promote AI use in their company. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn told The New York Times in an interview published last month that the language learning platform organizes a weekly activity to encourage teams to use AI.
“Every Friday morning, we have this thing: It’s a bad acronym, f-r-A-I-days,” von Ahn said.
“Those mornings, we let each team experiment on how to get more efficient to use AI,” he added.
Liu cofounded Airtable in 2013. Initially a spreadsheet application, it relaunched as a vibe coding platform in June. Airtable has over 700 employees and was valued at nearly $12 billion in December 2021, per PitchBook.
In a statement announcing Airtable’s relaunch as an “AI-native app platform,” Liu said the rise of companies like Lovable and Cursor suggests that vibe coding is the “killer application of AI.” This trend presented a new opportunity for Airtable, he added.
“This is the real unlock. AI chat interactions are good for one-off requests, but you need an AI app to scale AI work,” Liu said in June.
