Categorize data with Airtable AI
Airtable AI makes it easy to categorize, label, and segment your data using AI automatically and accurately. You can use this categorization to then better organize, filter, and analyze your data.
Applying an AI field template
To quickly get started with categorization, you can create an AI field and choose a related template:
General > Categorization
Product > Feedback categorization
UX Research > Sentiment analysis
These templates make it very simple to configure an AI column. With General categorization, all you have to do is choose the field that contains your content and enter a comma-separated list of categories.
Content to be categorized: Hotel review
Copy and paste a comma-separated list of categories:
Safety, Cleanliness, Check-in, Food & Beverage, Price, Convenience, Room size, Noise level
Optionally, you can provide a few examples and provide additional instructions or guidance to the AI. Providing just 1-3 examples may significantly improve the quality of the categorization.
Adjusting AI field settings
You can enable the “Generate automatically” setting to have categorization automatically run when your field data changes.
By default, Airtable will select the best AI model, which may yield the best results but costs more credits per run and is slower. If you choose to not use AI models that optimize for the best results, then your text will populate more quickly
It’s recommended to use 0 for Randomness when categorizing, as you don’t necessarily want more “creative” answers.
Using AI field with custom prompts
These templates are a good place to start, and if you ever want to do something more advanced, you can move onto a custom prompt to build a more flexible AI query.
You can convert a templated prompt to a custom one by clicking the “Change to a text box” button:
This will allow you to see the prompt that was created based on your configuration in the template wizard.
Examples of things this enables you to do:
Changing the AI persona to be specific to your use case
Using multiple input fields
Providing descriptions of the categories in addition to just their names
Giving feedback examples that are more specific to your categories
Changing the instructions, such as asking the AI to pick multiple categories instead of just one
You might use this edited custom prompt for tagging a hotel review with any of the relevant tags, not just one:
Using AI in Automations
If the AI field is not flexible enough for you, Automations provides a more advanced way of performing categorization.
In Automations, you can create an AI action which makes a query to an AI model and gets back a response. You can then use that response in any of the ways you use Automations today—write an email, create a doc, post to Slack, write to a field in a base. In addition, you can input that response back to another AI action, creating the ability to chain AI calls together.
As an example of categorization, you can quickly create an automation to:
Run when new feedback comes in via a form.
Take the feedback content and a custom prompt that is configured in Automations and send it to AI to identify the feedback sentiment.
If the sentiment is Negative, then post it to a Slack #feedback channel. If it’s positive, it posts to the #customer-love channel.
Try it now
Airtable AI makes it easy to categorize and label the data in your Airtable base. You can use a template to get started quickly, write a custom prompt for additional power, and use an automation for cases where a field might not fit.
About the author
Airtableis the digital operations 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, 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 digital operations and citizen development to help transform how work gets done.
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