48 // AI in Formable

In the last year, I was a bit reluctant to get super excited about AI. At least compared some friends and people in tech who are always on the bleeding edge.
But now that I’ve been thinking more and more about how AI might be useful, generally and within Formable, I don’t want to imagine a future without it.

In the last couple of weeks, I thought about how Formable could make use of AI. Some apps like Notion or Reflect added AI writing assistance features recently. While that’s cool in any tool and I do want writing assistance in Formable eventually, I won’t work on that for now, as Formable is not primarily a writing tool. It doesn’t even have formatting yet. I want to focus on what makes Formable unique.

How could Formable make use of AI then?

One conversation in the recent weeks that sparked some thinking in this area was with Justin Cranshaw from Maestro AI about their article on team knowledge management. It’s a good read btw. It talks about problems in scalability of collaboration, maintainability, choosing tools, chat, search, and suggests a solution.

Librarian / Gardener
Many people and organisations build huge wikis, but never review them. They become a mess, and thus useless. An effective knowledge base is a living thing, and needs to be cared for. That’s a lot of work though, so some help making the process easier and faster could be useful.

Formable AI could help build structures for keeping information organised. I’d envision it as a librarian or gardener.

Another idea I had this week is assistance with creating queries / filters in Formable. This could not also help with speed of query creation, but the system could also be a teacher of what’s possible within Formable.

I’m having fun exploring such ideas now, whereas six months ago I wouldn’t have thought about introducing any AI features.