Liu: Product leaders must play directly with underlying AI primitives
Howie Liu · How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO) · Aug 31, 2025 · at 12:54
Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu explains why tech executives must act as hands-on 'IC CEOs' when building with AI.
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“Like, AI is something you have to play with, and ideally, you're playing with both the, like, kind of packaged up, you know, app or solution that you've built with it, but you're also playing around directly with the underlying primitives. You're using The models, either via API or via, like, a chat interface, like, you're really pushing them to the boundaries and, like, because that's the only way that you really understand what these new ingredients, it's like, as a chef, you just gained access to, like, amazing new ingredients, but you have to, like, actually kind of get comfortable with them to put them into a new dish.”
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