Airtable’s AI Push Is Landing in Smartsheet’s Backyard
Airtable has spent the last 18 months quietly rebuilding itself around AI, and the product it has today looks less like a spreadsheet with views and more like a no-code data platform with machine-learning wired directly into workflows. That repositioning is starting to show up in the enterprise sales pipeline – specifically in deals that used to be Smartsheet’s to lose.
Smartsheet has long owned the project management and work management layer for mid-size and large enterprises, particularly in industries like construction, manufacturing, and government contracting where process documentation and approval workflows matter more than aesthetic UI. Airtable’s new AI features are targeting exactly that layer, not through flashy consumer demos, but through practical automation that enterprise buyers can show to a CFO and justify on a budget line.
What Airtable Actually Built
The core of Airtable’s AI rollout centers on what the company calls AI fields – dynamic columns that can summarize records, categorize incoming data, extract structured information from unstructured text, and generate draft outputs without any coding. For an ops team managing vendor contracts or a marketing department routing creative briefs, that means less manual triage and fewer tools stitched together with Zapier. The practical effect is that Airtable tables start functioning more like lightweight intelligent databases than static trackers.
On top of that, Airtable introduced an AI assistant layer that lets users build automations through natural language prompts. A user can describe a workflow in plain English and the system generates the automation logic. For enterprise buyers who have historically complained that Airtable had a steeper learning curve than Smartsheet for non-technical staff, this matters. It lowers the barrier to internal adoption without requiring a dedicated admin to build and maintain every workflow.
The pricing structure has also shifted to accommodate larger teams. Airtable’s enterprise tier now includes AI features at scale without treating AI calls as a separately metered premium, which is a notable contrast to how many SaaS platforms have introduced AI as a pure upsell. A team that was already paying for Airtable at scale can now access the AI functionality without a separate negotiation. That framing makes AI feel like a platform capability rather than an add-on, which is exactly the pitch that resonates with IT procurement teams.
The interface improvements matter too. Airtable has pushed hard on making its interface more approachable for people who never wanted a relational database, they just wanted a place to manage projects. The gap between what Smartsheet offers in terms of familiar grid-based project views and what Airtable offers has narrowed considerably. A department head switching from Smartsheet today would not face the same learning curve they would have faced two years ago.
Where Smartsheet Is Vulnerable
Smartsheet’s enterprise moat has always been its depth in structured project management – Gantt charts, resource management, portfolio-level reporting, and tight integrations with Microsoft 365. That moat is real. But it is not AI-native, and Smartsheet’s own AI rollout has moved more slowly than the pace at which Airtable has shipped.
The risk for Smartsheet is not a mass exodus. Enterprise contracts are sticky, switching costs are high, and IT departments do not migrate core workflow tools casually. The risk is at the edges – new team expansion, new department onboarding, new use cases that don’t have an existing Smartsheet license attached to them. When a head of operations at a company that uses Smartsheet for project tracking wants to build a new vendor management system, they are now more likely to evaluate Airtable alongside Smartsheet than they were 18 months ago. That is where the competitive pressure is most real.
The Broader Shift in Work Management
What makes this competition particularly pointed is that both Airtable and Smartsheet are targeting the same buyer profile – operations leaders, program managers, and department heads who need structured data and workflow visibility but do not have engineering resources to build custom tools. The category used to be defined by who had the best grid view or the best Gantt chart. Now it is being defined by who can automate the manual work that happens inside those grids.
Airtable’s AI features are strongest in data transformation and content generation tasks – pulling structure out of messy inputs, generating summaries, routing records based on logic. Smartsheet’s strengths remain in timeline visualization and enterprise governance. For teams that weight those differently, the decision calculus is shifting. A content operations team or a product launch team is likely to find Airtable’s AI more immediately useful than Smartsheet’s current feature set.
This pattern is not unique to these two companies. Across the enterprise software market, AI is being used as a wedge to reopen buying decisions that had already closed. A product that was not previously in consideration for a category can become relevant quickly when it offers a capability the incumbent does not. Airtable is applying exactly that logic against Smartsheet’s installed base, and it is doing so in a way that does not require Smartsheet’s existing customers to feel dissatisfied – it just requires them to have a new use case to fill. (This same dynamic is playing out in adjacent markets – Replit’s deployment push is running a similar play against established developer infrastructure platforms.)
What Comes Next
Smartsheet is not standing still. The company has its own AI roadmap and its partnership depth with Microsoft gives it distribution advantages that Airtable cannot replicate quickly. Enterprises already running Microsoft 365 and Azure have organizational inertia pulling them toward tools that integrate natively with that stack, and Smartsheet benefits from that gravity.
Airtable, for its part, has raised enough capital to sustain a prolonged build-out and its AI shipping cadence has been faster than most competitors expected. The question is whether it can hold enterprise accounts through full contract cycles, support complexity, and compliance requirements that Smartsheet has spent a decade building infrastructure around.
The sharpest test will come at renewal time for Smartsheet customers who have been experimenting with Airtable in parallel – and in enterprise software, there are always teams quietly running parallel experiments. When those experiments reach a conclusion, Smartsheet’s renewal conversations will get harder to predict.
