What is Airtable?

What is Airtable?

Growing organizations often try to unlock speed through tech adoption—quickly bringing in multiple, disconnected tools and processes. As a result, teams are misaligned, data is siloed, and it's even harder to drive business impact together. That's where Airtable comes in. 

With Airtable, your organization can move fast while moving together. Airtable allows you to run your most important business processes—from tracking global marketing campaigns to managing your product roadmap—all on a single platform. 

We’ll get into a deeper explanation of how Airtable makes this possible below. But first, here’s a glimpse into the ways Airtable has transformed how organizations work together: 

Why Airtable?

Drive faster business results

Today, over 300,000 organizations use Airtable to move fast, stay connected and increase business impact. 

From LinkedIn to Hearst to Shopify, Airtable helps teams build powerful, flexible apps on top of shared data to power their unique workflows. Gathering feedback from customers, planning product launches, and tracking sales—all of these essential workflows are interoperable, but customized to each team’s specific needs. 

Enterprise-scale organizations that use Airtable have results that speak for themselves—from Blackrock launching new features 2x faster for clients, to Equinox Media creating 40x more on-demand content. 

Make teams more effective

With Airtable, teams can build apps to power their workflows, all working from the same data sources, and all updated in real time. 

That means less time spent chasing down information from someone on the other side of the company, and bouncing between tools to get an accurate reading of what work is underway—and more time spent on high-value tasks that drive more impact to your business. 

With access to cross-functional data, teams’ trust in the data (and in each other) deepens. They’re aligned from the start, and free to move quickly and make decisions, without second-guessing strategy, direction, or one another.

Mitigate business risks

With accurate, up-to-date data, your teams will be working from the most current information, and can avoid costly business-critical mistakes. 

A recent Forrester study found that almost half of organizations said silos result in a higher risk of making mistakes or delayed decision-making. Airtable breaks down those silos by giving teams access to real-time shared data, helping them avoid making manual mistakes, while providing more visibility for  informed decision-making. 

Further, organizations can now manage apps at scale with a single platform built with enterprise-grade security and controls to manage users, groups, and permissions.

What is the Airtable Connected Apps Platform? 

The Airtable Connected Apps Platform™ empowers teams to build custom apps on top of shared data. Organizations can create purpose-built solutions to support their unique workflows, whether it’s to launch a global marketing campaign or manage the product roadmap. 

The result: teams that can move together, move faster, and deliver better business results. Here’s how.  

Access real-time shared data

It all starts with shared company data—a single source of truth—that powers all workflows and ensures work moves together. Airtable is built as a relational database, which makes it possible for teams to see data changes and react in real-time—and can trust that information is always up to date. 

Data can be synced and shared between teams. This allows cross-functional teams like marketing and customer support to move related content and campaigns forward based on the most recent information—without waiting for a status meeting or an email. 

Connected data means that teams can see data changes and react in real-time—and can trust that information is always up to date, resulting in less confusion, and fewer mistakes.

Build custom apps easily

Instead of being force-fit into rigid pre-built solutions, teams can easily build powerful apps within Airtable to suit their unique needs, like collecting user feedback or marketing calendar, which your team can use to move work forward. 

Get your team out of repetitive, time-consuming tasks using trigger-action workflows using automations. These can be triggered by almost anything, from new records being added to a database to a specific keyword popping up in a Slack channel, and can tie to a variety of other platforms. 

Built on top of shared data, with Interface Designer your team can create interactive interfaces for different audiences to view and take action. Pull together important metrics for a leadership dashboard, or standardize a searchable client list your sales team can reference and update. If your process changes, adjust each page in real time—make updates directly within the app, and then embed additional views like Gantt, Kanban, and more to visualize critical work. 

Connect your apps

With connections to the most popular platforms, Airtable can communicate seamlessly with other apps you build within Airtable as well as with other tools and systems of record your teams use. Connect the apps you build in Airtable to hundreds of critical systems like Salesforce, Jira, and Tableau.

You can set up a workflow that triggers when a file gets uploaded to Google Drive, to notify a Slack channel when a task gets marked as complete, or track a Zendesk queue through every step of a process. With a breadth of integrations, extensible APIs, and custom scripting you can integrate with almost any tool in your workflow. 

Tools built for enterprise-scale endeavors

Enterprise-scale organizations require enterprise-scale tools, and Airtable is uniquely suited to large organizations working with large amounts of data. 

The Airtable Connected Apps Platform™ is designed to grow with the needs of your business. Even when small projects suddenly become critical business apps, you can track every aspect of your organization’s mass production work, set up multiple syncs that generate records, or add your hundreds of employees and their individual workflows. 

The larger your org is, the more important it is for admins to have control over that data to maintain security. Securely manage apps at scale with controls for users, groups, and permissions and with full data governance and ownership across unlimited workspaces, you’ll never be limited in your agility or collaboration. 

Here’s how to get started

We've talked about the “what” and the "why" of the Airtable Connected Apps Platform™, now you can dive into the "how" so that you and your team can get started with Airtable today.