Howie Liu

Howie Liu co-founded Airtable in 2012 and built it into one of the defining “no-code” tools — a spreadsheet-database hybrid that let non-engineers assemble their own apps and workflows. Before Airtable he founded a CRM startup acquired by Salesforce, giving him an early education in how ordinary teams actually build software.

Refounding Airtable as AI-native

On June 24, 2025, Liu relaunched Airtable as an “AI-native app platform,” unifying its Cobuilder and Assistant features into a single conversational agent called Omni. The pitch: users describe the app they want in plain language and agents generate it — production-ready and scalable — while an “army of agents” automates thousands of hours of work. Liu told colleagues he considered the move a refounding of the company, and restructured the entire organisation around AI to make it happen.

Liu frames the transition as more consequential than the original leap to cloud SaaS, betting that the future of business software is conversational and agent-driven rather than menus and forms. It is a high-stakes reinvention: skeptics note that “vibe-coded” apps still have to survive contact with real production data and enterprise governance — precisely the reliability gap Airtable now promises to close.