Airtable CEO: AI Will Make You Almost Superhuman | Howie Liu

0:00Study and play.

0:02Howie Liu:Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last. Ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. I'm the bottleneck because all the content goes through me. What if I have an agent that already knows my taste and I say like, you just let it give the feedback.

0:38Howie Liu:If you could hire as many people as you wanted for almost zero cost, like what other roles would you hire people into? Howie Liu built one of the biggest software companies on the planet. Airtable is used by more than 80 % of the Fortune 100. The people who are able to do that most effectively will become like almost superhuman, right? You're able to give good judgment and feedback to just like a really effective CEO of humans. You could imagine building a company that you never would have dreamed of without any employees or with minimal employees. So the tinker mindset is most important for most.

1:10Howie Liu:And I think the second is really... My goal is that anyone who has been consuming content about AI but was not like scared to try it but thought it was too complicated, I want them to actually deploy a few agents after watching this video to realize how powerful the technology has become compared to like two years ago when they maybe tried one prompt in chat GPT and they're like, oh, this is nothing, all the hype, I don't understand it. When you work with this technology correctly, it's actually really transformative. Can you talk to me about the current state of AI? So we've been in an era of chatbots.

1:49You had to initiate the process, correct them, and then the output, you wouldn't really trust an agent to post for you on LinkedIn. I feel like right now we're trying to close the loop with these agents, like teach them our taste, teach them how we give feedback and make them more autonomous. Is that what you're saying too?

2:06Howie Liu:I do think like there's been this, you know, kind of step function change in the experience that you can create with AI from pre-ChatGPTs. But then I think we entered like a mature era of even AI chatbots where the models got smarter. So even thinking about like, you know, the year after GBD4 came out, you know, we could actually do really interesting things with chatbots. So chatbot maturation. And then I think we started to hype agents a little too early. So there was a year, like last year, people were, you know, they were saying this is the year of the agents. And I think that was when Salesforce Mark Benioff went up and was talking about like, you know, in the future, every CEO is going to have thousands of agents, like, you know, agent employees and human employees.

2:46Howie Liu:and I think it was correct, but just early. And so what we finally hit now, I think, and some would say like, really it was like around end of last year with like the anthropic like Opus 4.5 and beyond generation of models. But now, you know, you have GPT 5.5 and Kimi 2.6, like these open source and, you know, alternative models that I think have all reached this level of intelligence that actually enable agents to be like almost human-like, right? And autonomous. is. Do you, when you see a post on X where somebody says, I sleep at night and my company is being run by 50 agents. Do you believe that?

3:21Cause I, I don't know, like I've deployed a lot of agents, but I can't sleep. It's still in my head. Like I'm responsible for that agent. I'd rather have more humans to just control those agents. But do you think we're moving towards that reality?

3:36Howie Liu:You know, I think, um, I think that as the models get better and better, we do need to rethink the entire paradigm and like the product form factor to reflect it. So I'll use a parallel here, which is in the development agents world, you know, you had co-pilot GitHub co-pilot, that was kind of the first, you know, kind of chat bot for developers, right? And it really was that like, you couldn't have it go and develop like really complex programs. It was more like you could auto complete a few lines of code at a time. And so it was a convenience. Then you had Cursor, which introduced its own AI agent called Composer, which is different from like the now what they're using that name for is the model they've fine tuned.

4:16Howie Liu:But at the time, it was a much more autonomous agent, you could tell it go and like, build me this file, write me this, this simple, like, you know, kind of script or function, and would do something a lot more autonomously than, you know, the original copilot experience. I think now yet we've entered into a new era where the agents do enable, you know, kind of you to go and execute on parallel in parallel with multiple agents. And so in the development world, the best developers are already, you know, they're not using necessarily cursor, they're actually now using many different agents, maybe it's cloud code, for instance, running in parallel.

4:49Howie Liu:And it almost does feel like they have their own company or team running, including overnight, right? I actually, when I'm developing, I use agents that, you know, I try to have them do something substantial before I go to sleep so that, you know, for hours, at least, like I'm not wasting bandwidth cycles, and they're doing something useful. And so when I wake up, they've already completed, right? So I, you know, I think we are moving to a world where the form factor will start to look more like managing a fleet of agents, or almost managing like, you know, people, you know, like everybody, when they transition from being an individual contributor to becoming a team manager, it's kind of a different role, right?

5:25Howie Liu:You still need some of the same techniques, but also, it's quite different. So I think we are moving in that direction. But to your point, I think it's also not yet at a point where you literally just have the agents do everything, right? I don't think agents can effectively run an entire company or any substantial company autonomously. When do you think this flip is going to happen? Do you think by the end of this year, we're going to see more output? That's actually deployed right away by agents? I think that to your point, like on analytics, the fact that agents can help close the loop with you know, maybe drafting some content, there's still a human review step, you're posting it, and then maybe the agents are helping to analyze what's working, what's not working, and seeing what's, you know, kind of catching fire out there from other people on in the content world.

6:09Howie Liu:You know, I think it does create this like really high leverage circuit for people who know how to effectively deploy agents. So even if humans are still in the loop at points, I think that the amount of the loop or the percentage of the loop that is more agent driven is going to increase and increase and increase until at some point it's almost like, yeah, there's a human, but like that human is extremely leveraged. And you could imagine building a company that you never would have dreamed of without any employees or with minimal employees. Now you can do that with agents. Absolutely. And I see it with my content.

6:40We haven't really expanded. The team was still hiring, but we are producing, I think, three times more content just because it's so much easier to generate that content. Of course, we have to check in everything, but one person can now handle like GEO and newsletter and also threads. And another person can do three other outlets.

7:01Howie Liu:And maybe even like researching ideas. So like, you know, all the substantive work that goes into like going deep on a topic, like a lot of that can be enabled by agents. So for someone who's excited about all of this, but also they don't know, like, I am also confused every week. There's something new, There is Claude with Coork, Codex, oh my God, Perplexity Computer, amazing, Hyper Agent. How do you choose? And I saw you use Claude as well. It's not like you're just choosing one tool. What's the best setup? Yeah. So I think maybe going back to our generational metaphor, there was the chatbot era.

7:35Howie Liu:And there were a lot of products that were built as chatbots. And now we have agents that are much more fully autonomous. So I first would separate products that kind of fall into the chatbot era from the agent era. Even within the same company like Anthropic, they have Claude, like the vanilla version, which is much more close to a chatbot. I mean, it is actually a weekly agentic product, so it can do a few turns at once. But you're not using Claude to go and work on something for five hours without human intervention, right? And this is Claude, like the end user product. confusingly they also use that name for their models and as a prefix to their other products like cloud code and cloud co-work but the plain you kind of end user cloud experience i think of as more of a chat bot um likewise with chat chabit and that can still be very valuable but you know when you think about like frontier agents that are actually able to perform you know maybe hours of human equivalent work autonomously you know you put into that category open claw you know everybody kind of got excited about OpenClaw on Twitter because of what it could do, I would put into that category Claude Cowork.

8:39Howie Liu:And then, you know, products like Perplexity Computer and, of course, HyperAgent. And then within that bucket, there's kind of, there's, you know, I think different options for, you know, depending on what you want. So what HyperAgent gives you and what we focused on is both the fact that you can do this in a much more team-enabled setting as you kind of refine their skills and memories. So we put a lot of emphasis into this like closing of the loop for self-improvement, which I think is key because even though agents are out of the box, very smart, and they're only getting smarter as the models underneath them get better and better.

9:13This is what I'm very excited to try when you mentioned the team collaboration. We don't use Slack, we use Telegram, but I saw you have this Telegram integration. And the thing is, and it's so funny, like I feel like the industry is moving at the same phase and thinking about the same problems because last week I was talking to my COO and I'm like, I'm giving so much feedback to my team in Telegram, which is inaccessible to like any bot really. So I have to download the conversations. Like how do we close this? How does the agent learn my taste? So what we're going to do, we're going to download the conversation, train the agent, but then we're going to add the bot to all the team chats that I have.

9:49So it learns my feedback and can give feedback to me instead of me to my team.

9:56Howie Liu:Exactly. Yeah. And I think, I mean, one, by the way, as an aside, I think Telegram has a really interesting opportunity to become maybe the dominant platform in messaging for agents because they just have the best ergonomics of all these messaging platforms to be able to deploy bots, right? You know, Hyperagent has a really first class Telegram integration, right? And even if you're not a current Telegram user, I might recommend for people to go and like set up a telegram a crowd because it's such an easy and free way to create both individual and group chats with your agents. And it's very cool actually to see in a group chat setting, you can add even multiple agents that you've created through hyper agent and have them jump into the conversation as relevant and even start to talk to each other, which is very cool.

10:38Yeah. Like even, even like give feedback. Cause what I realized in my company, I'm the bottleneck because all the content goes through me and sometimes I'm doing this, right? I can't get back to my team. What if I have an agent that already knows my taste? And I say like on busy days, you just let it give the feedback. Absolutely. Yeah.

10:55Howie Liu:I think that is one of the interesting emergent phenomena here, which is, you know, as people have gotten really into their agent building, like OpenClaw, you know, you see all these OpenClaw fans who have created like a virtual twin of themselves in their OpenClaw instance, right? This is my like virtual Howie agent that has really learned so much about me and actually does have real-time access to the same context that I do. So it knows what my schedule is. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, they talked about the singularity and like how we're going to put ourselves into like a computer and like, I mean, it's kind of actually happening with agents.

11:27Yeah. What's the most unique use case with hyper agent that you've experienced?

11:32Howie Liu:I personally like, you know, kind of these multimedia related use cases. So what I mean by that is, you know, sometimes for fun and sometimes for like actual kind of, you know, functional marketing purposes, I like to have a hyper agent go and create like marketing ideas. So at one point, we actually did do a billboard, a small billboard campaign for hyper agent announcing the launch of it. And I had it go end to end, sourcing the actual billboard location. So we worked with a vendor that had like, basically a list of all the billboards that were available. What's that? Are you doing it on one?

12:07Howie Liu:It was in New York, LA, and SF. And so we grabbed all the inventory and then it had all the specific locations, like what street it was on. And then HyperAgent was able to process all of those locations, cross-reference them with Google Street View and Google Maps. So it can literally put them on a map and then even show like the street view point of view of like, here's what that billboard looks like on the street. And then best yet, because it's very versatile in terms of being able to chain together different tools, it was able to take those street view images and then pass that in to leading image models like Nano Banana and then use that to generate a really high fidelity mock-up of what our billboards would actually look like.

12:47Howie Liu:You know, so it took real world location shots, mash that up with like our actual kind of campaign imagery, which it created based on the concept and then could help us visualize like here's literally what that that billboard on sunset will look like. I thought that was very cool. And then, you know, I think like, we ended up not, you know, like, we weren't around long enough to do a Super Bowl ad, we just started Hyper Agent, basically around the holidays. But, you know, had we done a Super Bowl ad, or maybe for next year, you know, I use Hyper Agent to go and generate some like actual video concepts, right.

13:20Howie Liu:So again, it's able to like come up with concepts, combining, you know, real product marketing, understanding of like, what does this product do? We fed it or gave it access to our documentation for Hyperagent. So very meta, but like Hyperagent was then able to learn about all of the capabilities and differentiation of Hyperagent. And then to be able to go and come up with really good marketing concepts that it could cut up into different scenes like a screenwriter or like a director of a Super Bowl ad script and then actually generate really high quality production grade videos using VO in this case from Google so that it actually looked like a real Super Bowl ad.

13:59Howie Liu:So I think, you know, I like the creative use cases because they're just so immediate and visceral. But of course, I also have like many functional use cases, chief of staff use case where it's reading my emails and Slack all the time and pushing me anything that needs my attention. So saying, hey, you just got this really important email from somebody, a customer or a partner or an investor. You should probably respond to this. And here's even a drafted reply. Can you show me some of your productivity use cases? because this is where I see a lot of my time being saved when I optimize stuff with ages.

14:35Howie Liu:Okay. So this is actually a demo account of mine that's realistically recreated based on my actual usage. My actual usage has everything of mine, like all of my calendar, my emails, everything. So it's a little sensitive. Either you can have it go on a recurring schedule or like similar to open clock and have a heartbeat mode where it's always you know waking up and checking new stuff and then pushing you messages either via telegram it could be via slack it could be via email but you can kind of set up how you want um i like telegram because then it just feels like it's almost like a personal assistant like messaging you all the time you can respond to it i mean especially telegram if you have the bot living in your group channels already with your team then you can just mention the bot and say hey you know go research this thing on behalf of the team.

15:20Go create caption for this post. Exactly.

15:22Howie Liu:Okay. So here's one that is one of my personal favorites. So obviously you have to be on top of Twitter or X like 24 seven now to like keep up with all the latest news. It's all happening so fast. It's kind of overwhelming. And sometimes I feel like I just like, I forget to check X and I miss some really important stuff. So I have one agent whose entire job is just to constantly watch X. And literally it's like doing this like all the time, 24 seven. And then it's making a judgment call. It knows enough about me and what I care about and air table and hyper agent that it can push to me messages alerting me, you know, when there's something interesting only when it's actually relevant to me.

15:57Howie Liu:Right. And it can even like frame this around, like, why is this relevant to you, to Howie? Interesting how social media is transforming because I see a lot of people doing this. Once you enter X, you forget your life. Totally. So you can go down a long rabbit consuming content for you. Exactly. It's an interesting shift for social media in general. Well, and you know, it's like agents consuming the content, but then, you know, also probably agents helping to create the content. And so, you know, there's a, it's, it's this funny loop of like what happens when it's really just like our agents posting and consuming all the content on our behalf.

16:29Howie Liu:Right. Exactly. Um, this is a favorite one of mine. And one thing you can do here is like, if you want to set up a live mode agent, you can actually click that dialogue button, or just ask it in the feed or in the thread. Turn this into an always-on agent and push me messages via Telegram when you see something interesting for me, right? Nice. And then it will set it up. It will walk you through the flow. You can set up like a Telegram bot. You're doing this now? And I'm realizing a few months ago, we built this system that gives us notifications about videos that are underperforming. Okay. Took us a few days.

17:09Howie Liu:Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, even a few days is far better than a few months or a few years, right? Like it would have before. But this is such a, like how technology progresses these days. You have to be always on, always testing. Yeah. Because there's this new product coming. Yeah. And I think, I mean, one of the cool things, if I take a step back and think about the state of tech right now, like I've always believed that you can choose to make tech like a enabling tool, right? Right. Like, in fact, like when we founded Airtable, we spent a lot of time studying the history of like personal computing, the Macintosh, Microsoft.

17:42Howie Liu:And it's quite interesting because like at one point, you know, all of the major like previous era computing companies scoffed at the idea of a personal computer. Right. Like they literally laughed at it. They were like, oh, nobody would need a personal computer on their own desk, let alone like they didn't even think about smartphones. And, you know, the idea that obviously Apple and Microsoft had was like, wow, like these processors are getting cheaper and faster. and in fact like instead of using that to do even more arcane and like specialized work what if we made this even more accessible what if we chewed up all of that computing power to make computers something that anyone can use and get value out of and i think there's a very strong parallel to models and like as the models get smarter yeah you could apply them towards very you know kind of complicated use cases like higher palantir for like 300 million dollars to do like a very complex, like, you know, government deployment of AI, but also the alternate point of view is you can use it to enable people to do even more broad and interesting and ubiquitous things.

18:41Howie Liu:Right. So I'm personally a fan of like the, you know, kind of democratization angle. That's the entire founding premise of Airtable was democratizing app creation. And I think now we have a very similar opportunity to do that for agents. And like, you know, I really think like there's going to be two paths of agents that are more and more powerful, but inaccessible. and then agents that are actually more and more friendly and accessible and useful to as many people as possible. Yeah. I just saw you speak on stage and you said builders are going to win in the next few years. How do you adopt the builder mindset?

19:13Howie Liu:Yeah. I mean, I think what really being a builder comes down to is one, like having the appetite to tinker. Like that's the most important thing, right? Because I think it's a humility to say like, nobody knows all the answers. Like if somebody tells you like, here's exactly how to build the perfect agent for every single use case and every single company out there like they're full of it because there's no way to prescribe that so perfectly like it's constantly changing and what's really cool about the builder community out there already uh on x for instance or like on reddit etc is you're finding that people are like almost accidentally discovering the best ways to use agents right like you know they're learning hey you know it turns out like one way to make the agents very very good at content production is to give it this kind of a skill with this kind of guidance, right?

20:00Howie Liu:Or maybe create a skill from, you know, the Mr. Beast leaked handbook on like how to create content. Like, you know, it turns out when you feed that into the agent, have it develop its own skill informed by that, it does really well, right? And so, you know, there's all of these emergent practices that actually make these agents work better and better. And the only way to go and kind of like really, you know, get good at it is to try it out, right? And the great thing is like, you know, there's no, you know, kind of masterclass, there's no PhD that you need for it. I mean, I'm sure you could take some great classes out there, but you don't really have to, right?

20:32Howie Liu:And like, you know, if you have nights and weekend time even to go and just play around with the agents and it's quite fun to use, I think that's the best way to actually get into it. So the tinker mindset is most important first and foremost. And I think the second is really just a willingness to really distill down like what is the work in order to generate the output you want, right? I think some people, have an easier time imagining what is the ultimate purpose of, let's say, software engineering or sales or marketing or content creation. And if you are stuck in terms of thinking about it as the activities that you currently do, so software engineering, the activity of writing code by hand, line by line, is now going to be obsolete, right?

21:16Same as script writing. Exactly. Yeah.