Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu discusses how observing Salesforce's platform model after an acquisition inspired the founding thesis of Airtable.
Opinion
Liu: Today's AI models hold a million times more untapped economic value
“Like, I think we could pause model development today and still get a million times more economic value impact from today's generation of models than we've fully realize.”
Insight
Liu: Point-solution AI touches only a fraction of enterprise workflows
“I think that, that, you know, you'll have some use cases addressed through solution companies that can be very big you know each individually. And yet, you know, I still think even if you added all of them up, they're still tapping into such a small fraction o…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Liu: Code-gen agents will not replace no-code platforms short of AGI
“I'm just very strongly of the belief that short of AGI, I think we're gonna have a really hard time having fully automated you know, Cogen agents that replace the need for no code, because You actually want to generate the outputs in no code because for a long…”
Insight
Liu: Horizontal AI adoption is bottlenecked by customer imagination, not technology
“What we've learned is that, you know, this is gonna be a really difficult product to just kind of release out there in a horizontal way and hope that everyone just figures it out, right? Even though there are so many different applications, you can apply it to…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Liu: Trillions in enterprise labor value await flexible AI workflow platforms
“But then there's still a massive long tail that an aggregate, I think is like, you know, trillions of dollars of economic You know, value or labor value equivalent that is just waiting to be sought for with, you know, a platform that has data, that has workflo…”
Opinion
Liu: Spreadsheets are the most prolific app building platform
“Everybody has used spreadsheets at this point. I mean, it's like the most prolific app building platform out there.”