Accelerate your work with Airtable AI
Airtable
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Accelerate your work with Airtable AI
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the business landscape. But with the many options available, choosing the right AI solution for your business can be daunting. Although the AI space is rapidly evolving and best practices are still being established, one principle remains clear: AI solutions are only as useful as the quality of data you provide them.
Imagine having a partner that tirelessly works alongside you, enhancing every aspect of your business process, in a fraction of the time traditional workflows usually take. Airtable AI effortlessly integrates with your critical business data, from campaign objectives to customer feedback, augmenting your work to drive outcomes tailor-made for your business.
Airtable AI empowers you to focus on the bigger, more strategic aspects of your operations. It's not just about doing things faster, it's about doing them smarter.
In this guide, we’ll walk through how your business can harness the power of Airtable AI. Transform and then accelerate crucial steps of your work with our first AI feature, the AI field, currently in beta.
What is the AI field?
With the AI field, you can implement text-based generative AI to power your workflows – from analyzing customer feedback, drafting marketing briefs, crafting job descriptions, or even writing blog posts.
Airtable’s AI field acts as an integrated assistant in your workflow, consistently enhancing efficiency and impact.
The field is designed for continuous assistance, eliminating previously manual tasks. Once embedded into your processes, the AI field can offer support at every stage of your workflow.
What’s more, you can use multiple AI fields together to multiply their combined output, for exponential power and precision across critical steps of your business.
Let’s explore a few examples of how teams can leverage the AI field to accelerate critical work:
Categorize, summarize, and analyze customer feedback
Without a system to sort and analyze customer feedback, product teams may struggle to spot trends, resulting in delays in identifying and addressing customers’ needs.
With Airtable AI, your product team can get to know your customers better, and faster. By leveraging the AI field at multiple points in a customer feedback workflow, a product team can transform what was a manual, time-consuming process into a streamlined insights engine.
If your feedback is organized in your Airtable app, a product operations manager can utilize the AI field in Airtable to automatically analyze and categorize it into specific product categories. Once set up, this categorization will auto-run on each new feedback submission.
Let’s explore how:
Tag feedback in real-time - Set up the AI field to tag feedback based on what your team cares about most. Track these trends on a dashboard and share with your team.
Keep a pulse on customer sentiment - Use the AI field to run a sentiment analysis on feedback to know if it's positive, negative, or neutral—no technical knowledge needed.
Take timely action on customer needs - Create another AI field that generates a draft response to the customer, which a PM can review and then use an Automation to send.
Notify the right people - Based on the AI field results, set up an Automation to send an alert to a Product Manager when a new piece of feedback has been created in their product area.
Plan and execute marketing campaigns
Planning and executing marketing campaigns can be a lengthy process, especially when you start from scratch. From drafting a campaign brief, editing it based on various factors, and finally translating it into different languages, there’s a lot to keep on track.
For marketing teams, leveraging Airtable AI directly in their campaign workflows can be a game-changer, saving effort and keeping work aligned.
A marketing manager can use the AI field to plan and execute effective marketing campaigns, generating critical campaign collateral based on existing details like campaign positioning, or target audiences already organized in your Airtable app.
Let’s explore how:
Get to a first draft in seconds - Use the AI field to generate a campaign brief using key inputs like campaign objectives, target audience, budget, and timing. Then your marketing manager can refine and personalize this AI-assisted draft to perfectly align with their unique vision and expertise.
Match your brand voice - Adjust the prompt to match your organization’s brand voice in customer-facing campaign materials, based on examples of previous campaign briefs or content. Provide input to the AI operator to adjust the output as well as provide your own specific edits to make sure the end result is truly yours.
Automatic localization - Set up an AI field to take a first pass at translating your marketing copy into key languages, ensuring consistent messaging across all global operations.
Streamline recruiting workflows
In the dynamic world of recruiting, many of the steps in the recruiting process are time-consuming and manual. By integrating Airtable AI with your current applicant tracking system, people teams can revolutionize their approach.
A recruiting manager can implement the AI fields at multiple stages of a candidate’s interview process—from outreach to accepted offers.
Let’s explore how:
Enhance job descriptions - Use the AI field to auto-craft role summaries and responsibility outlines based on the desired qualifications and criteria, ensuring both speed and precision in job postings.
Generate LinkedIn search queries - Provide the AI field inputs such as job descriptions, locations, and required skills to generate queries to search for potential candidates in LinkedIn.
Draft offer letters - When you move to the offer stage, use the AI field to generate an offer letter based on your own company criteria and other market data around similar roles, then send the letter automatically with an Automations trigger.
How to level up your workflow with the AI field
Learning a new tool can be daunting, especially an emerging tech like AI. But with Airtable's AI field, your team can experiment with AI in a low-risk environment, building confidence while solving business challenges.
Now that we’ve looked at a few ways teams can use Airtable AI, let’s explore how you can get the most out of the AI field.
1. Decide what you want to generate
We've already explored a few specific ways to use Airtable AI—from generating marketing briefs to analyzing customer feedback—but the beauty of the AI field is its adaptability to any workflow.
Before adding an AI field to your existing Airtable app, be sure to do the following:
Identify your relevant data - The AI field will provide the best results when it has a rich dataset to work with. Evaluate the type of data you have in a given table and how it can be used to power your AI field. The more relevant the data, the better the AI field can generate useful outputs.
Consider your team’s needs - Consider who will use these AI results and how. Ideally, the AI field gives easy-to-understand, practical results that your team can really use.
Get ready to experiment! - The AI field is a powerful tool designed to supercharge your workflow, but experimentation is the key to truly harnessing its potential. Iteration is an essential part of the process. If the results generated the first time aren’t quite right, you can always adjust the prompt and generate new results.
Integrating AI into your workflow is as simple as adding the AI field to your base, interface, or form—just click the plus button and select “AI assist”. From there, you can choose from pre-built templates or write your own prompt from scratch.
Explore the list of pre-built templates that you can use and customize to generate specific types of content or insights.
These templates are designed to cover a wide range of common business needs, with suggestions on the data you’ll want to provide, making it easier for you to get started quickly.
If you’ve got something else in mind, you can also write your own custom prompt by selecting “Start from scratch”.
2. Provide the AI field with relevant context
Airtable AI empowers businesses to harness the power of AI by putting it in the context of their workflow.
With your AI field selected, now it’s time to provide it with relevant data that already lives in your Airtable app. Think of AI as a trainee who needs both directions and context to be successful. The clearer the instruction, and the richer the context, the more on-point the result.
Pro tip
There are advanced ways to bring data into an AI field, beyond simply referencing a text field in the table. Use the concatenate() formula to combine the text of multiple fields together or a lookup field to pull data from another table. Then, reference that field within the template or prompt.
For example, the template for categorizing feedback requires two input fields. As a builder, you’ll need to select the field that contains the feedback, and provide a list of categories for the AI field to categorize that feedback into. Once those details are added, the AI field shows a preview of the results, and is ready to generate an output for all records.
Pro tip
Unlock new workflows by chaining multiple AI fields together. For instance, you can use one AI field to analyze the sentiment of customer feedback. Then you can create a second AI field that uses the original feedback, along with the sentiment field, to draft an email response to the customer, altering the tone to correspond to the feedback sentiment.
While the pre-built templates can help you get started, you also have the option to write custom prompts for the AI field. To write your own prompt, select “Start from scratch”.
Here are a few best practices when writing custom prompts with the AI field:
Tell the AI what its role is - Start your prompt by telling the AI model what persona you want it to emulate, such as “You are a Product Manager with 10 years of experience in B2B SaaS companies.” This gives the AI an indication of the style and content that you want from it.
Tell the AI what task you want it to accomplish - First, tell the AI what you want it to do, then specify anything you don’t want. For example: “Write a campaign brief for a campaign called: {campaign_name} with the following description: {description}. Do not include any information about timing and budget.”
Include relevant data - Use the plus sign or type “{“ to add a field into the prompt. When doing so, the content of that field will be entered into the prompt, so make sure to give the AI a description of what that field contains. For example: “Translate the following text: {text} into {language} using the following style: {style).”
Provide examples - Providing examples can help the AI generate output that is closer to what you are looking for. In some cases, like categorization, examples are key to making sure the model knows how to accomplish the task. When providing examples, set up your prompt so that the examples come at the end, followed by a reiteration of what you want from the AI. For example,
Custom prompt example
You are a customer service professional working at an outdoor retailer.
Categorize the sentiment of a piece of feedback into the following categories: Positive, Negative, or Neutral. Categorize each piece of feedback into exactly one category.
Examples:
Feedback: "This is the worst tent I've ever used."
Sentiment: Negative
Feedback: "This backpack is alright."
Sentiment: Neutral
Feedback: "I really love this sleeping pad."
Sentiment: Positive
Feedback: {customer_feedback}
Sentiment:
3. Generate & fine-tune results
Once you've set up your AI field, it's time to put it to work and start generating results.
Before you save your AI field, there are three settings you can adjust that will impact the quality of your results:
Choose from the latest models - Decide which model you’d like to power your AI field, be it ChatGPT-3.5 or the more advanced ChatGPT-4.0. Learn more about which model is right for your use case here.
Fine-tune randomness - This setting determines the AI field's response variability. A value near 1 makes answers more imaginative, while closer to 0 yields predictable responses. Depending on whether you seek creativity or consistency, you can adjust this setting accordingly.
Choose to generate AI results manually or automatically - Depending on your workflow, this setting changes when the AI field generates new results. Learn more about setting up the AI field here.
For a detailed understanding of dependencies and usage, please refer to our comprehensive support article.
Using the AI field in your company
Here are three best practices for Admins to ensure a smooth rollout and governance:
Set workspace level controls - In the admin panel, admins have the ability to choose which workspaces have access to the AI field. This is an important governance step, as it allows you to control which workspaces can use this feature. Learn more about enabling the AI in the admin panel here.
Pilot testing - Encourage your team to experiment with the AI field in a sandbox workspace using non-sensitive or placeholder data. This creates a low-stakes environment for anyone on your team to get familiar with the functionality before deploying it broadly.
Get familiar with Airtable’s data policy - We are committed to maintaining the highest level of data security, ensuring that whatever you input into Airtable—including AI—is managed according to our data policies. Learn more about our data policies here.
Try it now
With Airtable AI, your team can seamlessly incorporate AI technology into your most vital business processes.
Get started using Airtable AI today! As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions as we continue developing new AI-driven features for Airtable.
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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