Agents of Scale How Airtable Scaled to 500K Customers—and Why They’re Betting on AI
Sep 25, 2025
Howie Liu, Co-founder and CEO of Airtable, leads a discussion with Zapier CEO Wade Foster on scaling businesses responsibly. They highlight the importance of a culture of experimentation in successfully adopting AI technologies. Liu emphasizes that tinkering and a company-wide experimental mindset are crucial for effective AI deployment. The conversation reveals how scaling with customer needs in mind can help enterprises evolve without losing their core values, offering valuable insights for leaders aiming for sustainable growth.
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Experimentation Unlocks AI Competency
- Companies that empower employees to build software for themselves unlock major productivity gains through experimentation.
- True AI competency requires hands-on tinkering with models, prompts, and integrations rather than top-down mandates.
Encourage Hands-On AI Experimentation
- Do encourage a culture of experimentation where teams tinker with different models, prompts, and workflows.
- Avoid rigid top-down rollout plans because you can't predict the right AI deployments without trying them first.
Top-Down AI Rollouts Often Fail
- Overly prescriptive, centralized AI rollouts struggle because they miss emergent, practical uses discovered by teams.
- Broad company adoption succeeds when everyone brings an experimental mindset to AI work.