Value in Automation and Workflows
Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
Airtable won by turning messy team processes into repeatable systems, not by making a better spreadsheet. In practice, that means a team sets up one base to collect forms, store records, trigger follow ups, and generate filtered views for different people. Gamma is pointing at that same time saving loop, where the real value comes after setup, when intake, sorting, and handoffs start running with much less manual work.
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Airtable’s core building blocks are tables, records, views, apps, and automations. That gives a team one place to capture data, reshape it into calendars or kanban boards, and trigger actions like emails, notifications, or syncs to other tools. The product feels like a spreadsheet on the surface, but behaves more like lightweight operational software.
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The common early use cases were operational. Marketing teams ran launch plans and content calendars there, operations teams tracked supplies and requests, and user research teams collected submissions. In Gamma’s example, signups and survey responses flow into one base, then get segmented for research and feedback workflows.
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That power comes with a tradeoff. As bases get more customized, they often need an owner who understands the schema and automations. Evidence from Airtable users shows the product can become fragile when many people touch a heavily automated base, which is why setup quality matters so much.
The next step for tools in this category is to hide more of the setup work and expose more of the output. The winners will be the products that let one person build the workflow once, then let everyone else simply use the result, whether that is a dashboard, a form, a live embed, or a presentation that stays connected to the underlying system.