Self-Serve AI Access Delivers Greater Value

Airtable's PLG Revival: Letting Users Experience AI Value Firsthand

Airtable CEO Howie Liu believes the most effective way to deliver AI value is through direct user experience rather than controlled sales processes. This approach has driven a strategic shift back toward product-led growth at Airtable after years of increasingly sales-led enterprise motion.

Liu points to ChatGPT as the ultimate validation of this approach: "ChatGPT is arguably the most successful kind of PLG product of all time... 700 million weekly active users... 10% of humans on earth use it weekly." He emphasizes this explosive growth happened precisely because users could immediately try the product without friction.

While Airtable had evolved toward more enterprise sales execution over time (still built on PLG foundations within those enterprises), Liu now sees AI as demanding a return to experiential discovery: "One of my goals is to shift my attention back into that builder-led adoption and literally showing in the product experientially, not telling in a deck, the value that you can get from AI and Airtable."

This philosophy has transformed Airtable's product experience. Rather than keeping AI capabilities as a secondary feature, they've made their AI agent "Omni" the default way of doing everything in Airtable. "The Airtable app as you know it is almost like an artifact that's manipulated by and can be tool-used by the agent," Liu explains.

Liu contrasts this approach with more sales-led AI companies like Palantir with their AIP deployments or Harvey in legal tech. While acknowledging these companies are successful, he believes the experiential approach creates more powerful adoption: "You can kind of get that in a sales motion, you can show a demo, maybe you can do a POC, but it's so much more powerful when you just open up the doors and say anyone who wants to come and sign up and trial this product can."

The key insight is that with AI, users often don't know what's possible until they try it themselves. By making AI capabilities immediately accessible through self-service, companies can accelerate discovery, adoption, and ultimately find more innovative use cases than they might through controlled demonstrations alone.

Why This Works

1. AI capabilities are often difficult to fully convey through traditional marketing or sales presentations
2. Users discover unexpected value through direct experimentation
3. The feedback loop from real usage helps rapidly improve the product
4. Self-service creates a wider top-of-funnel that can later be converted to enterprise deals
5. The approach aligns with how people naturally want to explore new AI technologies

For product teams considering AI features, this suggests prioritizing immediate self-service availability over perfection, and designing experiences that encourage exploration rather than prescribing specific workflows.