Airtable silently rolled out a cool new feature in automations. You can now specify the “user who took the action”.
I think they meant to say the “user account that triggered the automation”. 
But nonetheless, a very cool new feature! 
4 Likes
It isn’t necessarily the person who triggered the automation. The person may not even realized he triggered the automation. He may have just changed a field value that updated a formula that triggered the automation.
I haven’t tested to see what happens with automations based on conditions of a formula with a time based formula like NOW() or TODAY(). But I generally avoid those formulas anyway.
I first found out about this feature here.
If they change a field that updates a formula that triggers the automation, their name would still show up as the user, correct? I guess we should test and find out!
Yup. At least that is what happened in the quick test that I did. It didn’t work when I was testing the automation, but it did work in the live automation.
So this is useful for far more than just interface buttons.
I have not tested if a “when record created” automation brings in who created the record, but I suspect that it should.
Yep, this is a very cool feature. And thank you for testing this! 
Interesting that it works with the live automation, but not during testing.
But this does seem to confirm that it is the person (i.e. user account) who triggered the automation — whether they realize they triggered it or not. Of course, the “person” could be any user account or service account that is linked to a Personal Access Token.
1 Like
Just tested with “when record created”. It works when I create the new record in an Airtable grid view. It does not work when I create a record using a form view, even when I have the form setup to identify who submitted the form. Maybe a bug.
1 Like
Wow, very interesting! Great job catching that! Yeah, it seems like that might be a bug.
I updated my original post above to say “user account” instead of “user”, which is what I originally meant. I think I confused @Kamille-Parks as well on yesterday’s podcast, because I was saying “user” instead of “user account” (which could also include a “service account”).