Airtable development continues apace, as does our excitement for automation opportunities.

We love Airtable here at Aito. If you have no idea what Airtable is, I’ll break it down as simply as I can: it’s a cross-browser cloud-native spreadsheet-database platform that works on any device. Well, not the Aito office toaster, but devices we all know and love, such as mobiles, tablets, PCs and so on. We love Airtable because it makes hard stuff relatively easy. And now that it’s opening its ecosystem to a wider range of services, the future of how automation can be implemented into no-code cloud platforms looks exciting.

What Airtable does better than standard spreadsheet software is allow for the collection of multiple forms of data. These could be images, checkboxes and files, for instance. And Airtable acts like a database in that you can create relationships with other cells, sheets and “bases”. It’s arguably much more accessible than traditional options such as Access and Sharepoint. And there are lots of data views, such as Kanban, gallery, tables, and so on. I sound like a salesman, but I’m excited about the automation potential for building practical use cases in a really open Airtable ecosystem.

Mind-blowing project management automation

A few days ago, Airtable made its first business acquisition, of Bayes Technologies. This means assets entered into Airtable may become much better because Bayes is a data visualisation no-code cloud specialist that uses automation to present at-a-glance graphs. This is really helpful for data analysts, and for ensuring highly skilled people aren't bogged down by laborious manual data entry. It's something we talk about a lot at Aito!

What this acquisition represents is a serious move by Airtable into using technology to enhance and improve the product. An open ecosystem is the next logical step for a company that’s built a brilliant digital product, making use of higher levels of automation beyond simple If-This-Then-That implementations.

In other words, imagine if a certain automation specialist that works with intelligent, predictive automation harnesses the power of the Airtable platform. The possibilities are mind-blowing, especially for Airtable’s quoted user list of 80,000 companies. Because Airtable is modular, so highly configurable, it means project management possibilities are endless. As mentioned, it already integrates data with 2,000 apps via APIs, so the power of predictive analysis will take it to a whole new level.

One of my favourite cloud-native, no-code platforms just keeps getting better and better. If Airtable continues on this solid development path, the future looks great for business automation.