Airtable’s co-founder and CEO Howie Liu is pushing his employees to rethink how they work by putting AI experimentation at the center of their day. Instead of sticking to packed calendars and routine meetings, Liu has told the company’s 700-plus staffers to scrap business as usual, even for entire weeks, if it means exploring what AI can do. "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 on Lenny’s Podcast, stressing that curiosity and “play” are key to understanding the technology well. Liu himself is leading by example. He admits to being the “No. 1 most expensive in inference-cost user of Airtable AI” across the platform’s customer base. By running sales call transcripts through the company’s tools, sometimes racking up hundreds of dollars in computing costs, he says the payoff is clear. Compared to the millions a consulting firm might charge for similar insights, Liu sees it as a bargain. “Hundreds of dollars spent on this exercise is trivial compared to the potential strategic value of having better insights,” he explained. The move reflects a wider shift in Silicon Valley, where AI fluency is becoming a workplace requirement. Microsoft executives now describe AI as “core to every role and every level,” while Google’s Sundar Pichai has urged employees to “be more AI-savvy.” Duolingo has even institutionalised it with “f-r-A-I-days,” a weekly ritual where teams dedicate Friday mornings to experimenting with AI tools. For Airtable, which was valued at nearly $12 billion in 2021, this cultural reset ties directly into its future strategy. In June, the company rebranded itself as an “AI-native app platform,” with Liu betting that the next big wave in tech will be “vibe coding” platforms, systems that take AI far beyond simple chatbot interactions and make it scalable for businesses.
