Airtable CEO Howie Liu is making an unusual demand of his staff: take more time off work—at least from meetings—and dedicate it to playing with artificial intelligence.
In a recent episode of Lenny’s Podcast released Sunday and published by Business Insider, Liu, 36, said he has been actively encouraging Airtable employees to experiment with AI, not just as a tool for productivity, but as a way to reshape the company’s long-term strategy.
“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. “That’s the most important thing. Play. Experimentation.”
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Liu made clear on the podcast that his approach is not rhetorical. He described himself as Airtable’s most dedicated and, in his words, “intentionally wasteful” user of Airtable AI, the company’s own service.
“I take pride in being the No. 1 most expensive in inference-cost user of Airtable AI,” Liu said. He noted that he was not just the top user within his own company, but “globally across all our customers.”
For Liu, that “waste” is part of the point. He admitted to spending hundreds of dollars at a time on inference costs—AI computations—just to analyze sales call transcripts. To him, the exercise is far from frivolous.
“Hundreds of dollars spent on this exercise is trivial compared to the potential strategic value of having better insights,” Liu explained. “That’s invaluable, right? You could pay a consulting firm literally millions of dollars to get that quality of work.”
The culture he is trying to instill at Airtable mirrors a broader movement among tech CEOs to normalize AI as a routine part of everyday work. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn recently revealed that the language learning app organizes weekly AI experiments, cheekily branded “f-r-A-I-days,” where teams spend every Friday morning testing new ways to use AI for efficiency.
The approach reflects a growing recognition in Silicon Valley that AI adoption requires more than occasional pilot projects. Instead, it demands immersion, experimentation, and sometimes deliberate inefficiency—an argument Liu appears determined to embody.
Liu’s commitment to AI exploration comes at a pivotal moment for Airtable itself. He cofounded the company in 2013, initially as a spreadsheet-style application, but in June, Airtable relaunched as what Liu calls a “vibe coding platform.” The company, which employs over 700 people and was valued at nearly $12 billion in December 2021 according to PitchBook, is betting its future on becoming an “AI-native app platform.”
In a statement at the time of the relaunch, Liu argued that AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT may be effective for small, one-off tasks, but scaling AI in organizations requires something more structured.
“This is the real unlock,” Liu said. “AI chat interactions are good for one-off requests, but you need an AI app to scale AI work.”
He pointed to the rise of companies like Lovable and Cursor as evidence that vibe coding—the ability to build apps and workflows through conversational AI—is emerging as the “killer application” of the technology. For Airtable, that shift represents both a threat and an opportunity.
Liu, by encouraging his workforce to experiment—free from the strictures of calendars and deadlines— appears to be betting that play may not just inspire innovation but also help Airtable stake its claim in an increasingly crowded AI-driven software market.