I think we can all agree that 2023 is the year of AI. 2022 is a close second, but no one remembers the third most year of AI innovation. This is because it was a fad before 2022. The question everyone should be asking is - what will 2024 hold for advancements in AI?
Short answer: Massive advancements.
We hit the knee of the AI curve in 2021, and it led to exponential advances in 2022.
Predictions:
- In 2024 most consulting engagements (>50%) will require AI competency.
- By the end of this year, 1 in 4 consulting inquiries will include requirements that could be solved through AI better than traditional approaches.
- Through the end of 2024, most Airtable consultants (>50%) will drag their feet to become proficient with AI solutions.
- Airtable is already considered a laggard in AI; in 2024 its integrated AI features will be seen as yawners.
How long will this community wait before it has categories that embrace AI as central to all future Airtable solutions?
Reminds me of Diffusion of Innovations.
The future already exists. It is just small right now, so it is easy to not notice its existence.
If you aren’t using AI yet, it is too late to an innovator or an early adopter. It might still be possible to be part of the early majority, but not for long. That leaves being in the late majority, or a laggard.
Usually the laggards get the smallest piece of the pie. But if you don’t like pie, and if you can get enough to eat without pie, it’s okay to be a laggard.
Is “pie” a euphemism for money? Successful apps? Success as a consultant?
Yeah but… there’s this.
Even though there have been more than four thousand articles across many disciplines published on Diffusion of Innovations, with a vast majority written after Rogers created a systematic theory, there have been few widely adopted changes to the theory.[8] Although each study applies the theory in slightly different ways, this lack of cohesion has left the theory stagnant and difficult to apply with consistency to new problems.[87][88]
I once had a chat with Clayton Christiansen, who also pointed out the many flaws in the data Diffusions hypothesis. Even Christiansen was quick to point out that in terms of new advancements like AI, his own theories were likely to be obsolete.
Airtable got Salesforce investment and they have Einstein GPT. So things could change.
The fact that there has not been another round of layoffs made public at Airtable (as I predicted would happen last month) could signal a change has already happened.
Just floating a question -
How would the world of Airtable change if Salesforce announced the acquisition of Airtable later this afternoon?
Back to the AI question - if you examine how Einstein GPT works, you’ll see that this service is deeply integrated into the Salesforce security model. Since Airtable doesn’t have a model that is anywhere close to that maturity and thoroughly tested model, the only way for Airtable to lean on Einstein is when (haha, perhaps not if) your Airtable data is inside Salesforce.
Security context for users of AI in a database is a big challenge. What if GPT exposes the existence of a layoff topic, but not the data about the topic. That’s still a security breach. It is not unlike the challenge of providing pervasive search whose results must consider the security context of the searcher, another feature that Airtable has been unable to make progress on.
If Airtable remains an independent company, it will soon be forced to announce something with GPT. And it will probably be weak, poorly conceived, and limited in scope, but largely proclaimed as a perfect match, especially by Gartner.
This definitely seems like the end goal for Airtable.
In 1981 (when I created LapLink), it was year three of a seventy-five-year cycle.
In 1994 (when I created my web domain, globaltc.com), it was year two of a fifty-year cycle. I made a sizeable amount of money in year 7 (Quicksite).
In 2021 (when I co-created CyberLandr), it was year three in a thirty-year cycle. I’ve “invested” a lot of money in this deal so far.
I would agree with you if you were right. 
The reality is that the AGI movement is likely to be a fifty-year cycle. We’re in year one.
More like an “end-game” for end-users as an “end-goal” for Salesforce as Salesforce has a tendency though to kill things, extract the golden nuggets and clean the crime scene.
So perhaps as an advice is you would not put your money on Airtable, right?
Abrupt change can happen anytime and for any product. Probabilities of change is a concept we have to get comfortable with.
