Airtable CEO Howie Liu is encouraging his employees to take time off from regular work to freely experiment with artificial intelligence, urging them to dive into AI tools without hesitation. In a recent episode of Lenny’s Podcast, Liu, 36, said he would support staff canceling meetings—whether for a day or an entire week—to explore every AI product they believe could benefit Airtable. “If you want to cancel all your meetings for a day or for an entire week and just go play around with every AI product that you think could be relevant to Airtable, go do it. Period,” he said, emphasizing that play and experimentation are essential. Liu described his own AI usage as “extremely, intentionally wasteful,” revealing he is the highest-paying user of Airtable’s AI service in terms of inference costs. He shared that he spends hundreds of dollars on AI processing just to analyze sales call transcripts, calling the expense trivial compared to the strategic value gained. “Hundreds of dollars spent on this exercise is trivial compared to the potential strategic value of having better insights,” he said. “You could pay a consulting firm literally millions of dollars to get that quality of work.” His approach reflects a broader trend among tech leaders pushing for aggressive AI adoption. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn recently told The New York Times that his company holds weekly “f-r-A-I-days” where teams focus on using AI to boost efficiency. Liu, who co-founded Airtable in 2013, has positioned the company as an AI-native platform since its relaunch as a “vibe coding” tool in June. He believes this shift represents the true potential of AI—moving beyond one-off chat interactions to scalable AI-powered applications. In a statement marking the relaunch, Liu said the rise of AI-first platforms like Lovable and Cursor signals that vibe coding could be the “killer application of AI.” He sees this as a pivotal moment for Airtable, which now has over 700 employees and was valued at nearly $12 billion in 2021. By empowering employees to explore AI freely, Liu aims to drive innovation and maintain Airtable’s edge in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.