CEO tells staff to cancel meetings and play with AI
Airtable CEO Howie Liu is urging employees to cancel meetings and spend entire days experimenting with AI, calling curiosity the best way to understand the technology.
Airtable’s co-founder and CEO, Howie Liu, is reimagining workplace culture by asking his 700-plus employees to put artificial intelligence at the core of their daily work. Instead of clinging to back-to-back meetings and traditional routines, Liu has encouraged staff to scrap business as usual, even for entire weeks, if it means experimenting with AI.
Speaking on Lenny’s Podcast, Liu explained his philosophy, "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. ” He stressed that curiosity and "play” are critical to building genuine AI fluency.
Liu is leading by example. He admits to being the "No. 1 most expensive in inference-cost user of Airtable AI” across the company’s customer base. By running sales call transcripts through Airtable’s tools, sometimes spending hundreds of dollars on computing power, he argues the return is far greater than the cost. "Hundreds of dollars spent on this exercise is trivial compared to the potential strategic value of having better insights,” he said, adding that similar work by consultants could cost millions.
Airtable’s AI-first reset mirrors a larger trend in Silicon Valley. Microsoft executives now describe AI as "core to every role and every level,” while Google CEO Sundar Pichai has urged workers to become more "AI-savvy.” At Duolingo, Fridays have been rebranded into f-r-A-I-days, with employees dedicating time to AI experiments.
For Airtable, which was last valued at nearly $12 billion in 2021, the push is also a strategic bet. In June, the company rebranded as an "AI-native app platform”, with Liu predicting the rise of what he calls vibe coding — systems that go beyond chatbots to make AI scalable for businesses.