Google’s AirTable rival, Tables, graduates from beta test to become a Google Cloud product
Last fall, Google’s in-house incubator Area 120 introduced a new work-tracking tool called Tables, an AirTable rival that allows for tracking projects more efficiently using automation. Today, Google says Tables will officially “graduate” from Area 120 to become an official Google product by joining Google Cloud, which it expects to complete in the next year.
The Tables project was started by long-time Google employee, now Tables’ GM, Tim Gleason, who spent 10 years at the company and many more before that in the tech industry. He said he was inspired to work on Tables because he always had a difficult time tracking projects, as teams shared notes and tasks across different documents, which quickly got out of date.
Instead of tracking those sorts of notes and tasks associated with a project across various documents that have to be manually updated by team members, Tables uses bots to help take on some of the administrative duties involved in guiding team members through a project — like scheduling recurring email reminders when tasks are overdue, messaging a chat room when new forms are received, moving tasks to other people’s work queues, or updating tasks when schedules are changed.
The team saw Tables as a potential solution for a variety of use cases, including of course project management, as well as IT operations, customer service tracking, CRM, recruiting, product development and more.
