Inside Airtable: Our AI-powered procurement system
This isn't a theoretical playbook. Airtable’s procurement team built their AI-powered procurement system entirely on Airtable. This guide walks through every decision, workflow, and AI logic behind it so you can see exactly how it was done and what it would take to build it at your organization.
In this quick read, see:
- How you can build this — A step-by-step walkthrough from request intake to automated approvals, vendor research, and financial system sync.
- How the workflow changes — A before/after of every procurement step when AI does the routing, research, and contract review.
- What this means for your bottom line — The compounding impact on cost, headcount, and complexity might surprise you.
Airtable's own operations team replaced an ad hoc procurement process — requests scattered across email, Slack, and spreadsheets — with AirProcure, an AI-powered system built entirely on Airtable. It builds approval flows on the spot, extracts rights and obligations from every vendor contract automatically, and researches new vendors before a single conversation happens.
323 contracts
reviewed for termination rights (206 with rights, 117 without)
$100Ks saved
in annual contract renewal costs in the system's first year alone
1,000s of approvals
routed and tracked automatically, with no manual handoffs
$Ms managed
in vendor contracts synced directly with Airtable's financial systems
The problem with how procurement teams work today
Most procurement teams run into a version of the same four challenges, regardless of company size or how many vendors they manage:
- Approval routing breaks the moment a request changes. Someone has to manually determine which approvals are needed and route the request — and update the chain by hand whenever the details change.
- Sensitive data gets over-shared or over-restricted. Procurement touches financial data, vendor contracts, and legal commitments that not everyone should see. Without tiered access, teams pick one problem or the other.
- There's no single intake channel. Requests arrive through email, Slack, and spreadsheets, each with different levels of detail and no consistent way to track them.
- Multi-currency contracts create reporting headaches. Contract amounts in multiple currencies make it hard to enforce approval thresholds consistently, and impossible to report total spend without manual conversion.
Reality check
Without a system built around tiered access, teams either over-share sensitive information or create so many restrictions that the process slows down entirely — there's rarely a middle ground without automation.
How Airtable's procurement team uses Airtable
Airtable's procurement team built their own Airtable app, called AirProcure, to give the team a fully automated procurement process — one that routes requests, manages cross-functional approvals, extracts vendor contract rights, and syncs with financial systems.
How to use this build
- Replace every intake form with one smart request form. A single form handles every procurement type. Based on what's submitted, the system automatically determines what steps are needed and builds the approval flow on the spot.
- Route approvals automatically. Approvals go to the right person based on the data, not manual assignment. Change a cost center and the reviewer updates; flag a conflict of interest and a new approval step activates.
- Extract rights from vendor contracts instantly. AI reads every vendor contract as soon as it's added and extracts key rights and obligations — plus an AI helper that answers specific questions about a document without anyone reading the legalese.
- Research new vendors without the manual work. When a new vendor is submitted, AI automatically generates a research brief — company overview, core offerings, and relevant context — before the first conversation.
Get the full build walkthrough — the exact automation logic, approval-routing rules, and AI contract-extraction setup behind AirProcure
How every part of the procurement workflow changes
Here's the before-and-after across every step of the process:
Workflow area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Request intake | Requests arrive through email, Slack, and spreadsheets with inconsistent detail | A single form captures all request types and automatically determines which steps are needed |
Approval routing | Someone manually determines which approvals are needed and routes the request | The approval flow builds itself based on the data submitted and updates dynamically when details change |
Access and visibility | Sensitive procurement data is either over-shared or over-restricted | Tiered access gives every person exactly what they need |
Vendor contract rights | Teams read through vendor contracts manually to understand obligations and restrictions | AI extracts rights and obligations from every contract automatically in a searchable yes-or-no format |
New vendor research | Procurement teams research new vendors manually before evaluating them | AI generates a vendor overview and core offerings brief automatically when a new vendor is submitted |
Currency and thresholds | Contract amounts in multiple currencies require manual conversion before reporting or threshold checks | All amounts are normalized to USD automatically at submission, with moment-in-time conversions that update if amounts change |
Get the configuration behind every row — the routing rules, contract-extraction prompts, and currency-normalization logic Airtable used to build this
What this means for your bottom line
- The cost of the old system versus the cost of this one. Airtable's new procurement system replaced a previous one and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on annual contract renewals in its first year alone.
- Faster approvals, less time chasing people. When the approval flow builds itself and routes to the right person automatically, the procurement ops team spends less time on manual coordination and more time on work that actually requires their expertise. Thousands of approvals have been facilitated through this system, with routing, tracking, and communication handled automatically.
- A system that connects all the way through. The value isn't just in managing requests — it's that the system is deeply integrated with the rest of the business: creating purchase orders, creating vendors in the financial system, and sending documents out for signature and receiving them back, all from within the same app.
AirProcure shows what happens when procurement stops being a manual coordination job and becomes a system that routes itself, reads contracts for you, and keeps every number in one currency.