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Four years ago, we shipped Coda 1.0 to a small group of fans. Since then, millions of makers have made Coda their home to supercharge their work, stay organized, and foster collaborative workflows. We have listened closely, shipping features (and the occasional bug fix) on a daily basis.But every once in a while, we have packaged together a set of updates that we think represent a larger shift and have referred to them as our “dot oh” releases. In Coda 2.0, we shifted from individuals to teams by adding workspaces, Cross-doc, locking, and Maker Billing. In Coda 3.0, we opened up the creative ecosystem with a brand new editor and the ability for anyone to make a Pack that integrates Coda with third-party applications. Tens of thousands of teams have adopted Coda 3.0 and made it their own—with over 600 public Packs now published (and thousands built privately inside companies). Today, I’m excited to announce Coda 4.0 as a true all-in-one platform for businesses, now with AI. I’ve watched Coda evolve from being primarily a team-level tool to seeing many companies (like Qualtrics, Zoom, the New York Times, DoorDash, Figma, and more) elevate Coda to a business-wide platform. With 4.0, we aim to go even further: delivering end-to-end solutions, extending our ability to be your “single source of truth,” and unlocking the most connected AI work assistant that can truly understand each person, team, and company. And of course, since shavings make a pile, we also took a large number of our customer’s most common requests and developed creative solutions.Since we work in the open, you may have glimpsed a few of these changes already. Read below for the full story, watch this video from Maria walking through the updates, and/or to learn more.
Generative AI has taken the world by storm, faster than almost any technology since the mobile revolution. Like many new technologies, I saw my teenage kids and their friends as blazing early adopters—with some of them spending many hours per day in GenAI experiences.But when I spoke to colleagues and customers about AI at work, there was a notable difference. The promise of GenAI in the workplace seemed obvious, but no experience to date had really delivered on that promise. To them, the ideal work assistant should:Understand the actual information in your company (not just what’s on the internet).Be omnipresent in a surface where you spend all your time (not a separate experience).And actually do tasks (not just answer questions).With these expectations in mind, the Coda AI team developed our AI feature set to provide three different types of assistance:
Many Coda makers have pointed out that Coda is already the ideal surface for working with AI. The first entry point to Coda AI will feel familiar to any ChatGPT user. The ✨ icon in the bottom right corner of any doc opens an AI chat window. Then ask any question! The difference, you’ll quickly discover, is that Coda AI can reference your team’s work.Max’s experience isn’t unique. Coda AI has helped thousands of teams with knowledge assistance. We’ve seen examples range from retrieving that hard-to-find fact in your company wiki (”What’s our vacation policy?”) to quickly deriving the insight from a mountain of customer feedback (”Do customers prefer flexibility or performance?”).When information lives everywhere, your team can’t get anywhere.Instead of looking across hundreds of tabs, apps, and search boxes to find the answers you need, Coda AI provides knowledge assistance that references your work, your team’s context, and, perhaps most uniquely, the rest of your company’s tool stack, too.
Beyond answering questions, another very common use case for GenAI has been writing assistance. People everywhere flock to ChatGPT and similar tools to write everything from memos, blog posts, and even emails. The experience is amazing in many ways, but it has two clear challenges. First, it’s another destination that requires toggling back and forth, adding friction to your workflow. Second, this type of writing assistance can feel like getting help from a “smart, well-read intern”—they know a lot about the world, but nothing about you. Coda AI closes both gaps.The team really pushed further on this idea of an active collaborator and added an amazing feature: an AI reviewer that can mark up the whole page and leave comments about tone, content, or format, at your direction.But not only is Coda AI omnipresent in your everyday writing surface, it feels more like a well-informed team collaborator than a “well-read intern.”As one Coda maker put it:Each Coda writing prompt makes it easy to give additional context to the assistant—just @reference a page or table—no more copy and pasting. Now when you ask the assistant to help finish your product spec, it leverages your customer feedback as a starting point. Or when you’re looking at a customer’s sales history in your Coda doc, you can instruct your assistant to generate a customized email with the correct context.With Coda AI, your assistant works where you do and knows what you know, so you can finish 80% of your writing in 10% of the time.
The idea of generating a well-written, personalized email to an important customer is really exciting. But why stop there? What would it take for AI to actually send the email as well?The Coda AI team set a clear goal: if we really want to use AI to change how people and teams work, we can’t just answer questions and assist in creation—we actually have to do. After all, that’s the real jump in productivity.I asked our data team to pull some stats, and in the past year, Coda performed four billion tasks for our customers—now imagine how many more that will be when those tasks are driven by AI!We recently held a Coda customer meetup in New York, and I had a chance to watch one of our enthusiastic makers demonstrate Coda AI to another attendee. She started with a blank doc, where she connected the Gmail Pack and added a “send email” button, then configured it to use Coda AI to generate the body. She then gleefully pressed the button, and said, “Have you ever seen a doc do this?” as she watched the email send.But she wasn’t done there. She shifted to a table with a list of customers and said, “How cool would it be if we could do that for thousands of emails at once?” She then used the new AI column feature to quickly construct prompts for choosing which customers to email, which messages to send, and, of course, the buttons that actually sent the mail. Finally, she set a trigger that automatically sent these emails when a new customer is added to the list. Taking her hands off of the keyboard, she said, “I just saved an entire day of work!”Another attendee at the meetup, AJ Asver, talked about his experience with Coda AI:I know there are people who are worried about an AI work assistant that takes people’s jobs. But stories like these inspire me to think about this in a different way. An AI work assistant that sits alongside you, knows you, and can actually do tasks at your direction frees you up to do the important elements of your job—better.
Coda AI has been in Beta for the past few months, and we’ve seen an amazing impact as teams used the work assistant to perform millions of tasks. As one customer noted, they could spend 24 hours a day for an entire month on ChatGPT and not perform as many tasks as they could with Coda AI in just a few minutes.Of course, this led to a natural question: How should we price Coda AI?Many other products have chosen to add a premium fee for their AI offerings. Customers tell us this is expensive and complicated, as they juggle dozens of products, each with their own AI surcharges. It also leaves them deciding user-by-user who needs access to “Microsoft Word with AI” versus “Microsoft Word without AI.”Having two versions of each product is not only hard on customers, it’s difficult for the product developers as well. In Coda, we found that we wanted to infuse AI into the core elements of every part of the product. And so the add-on approach didn’t make sense to us.Moreover, we realized that the core Coda pricing model gave us a different option. With Maker Billing, teams only pay for Doc Makers, and those Doc Makers are often the ones who make the most extensive use of Coda AI. So, we’ve decided to make AI free for all paid Doc Makers.
As we asked the Coda AI team to bring GenAI to life as the Coda AI work assistant, we challenged every other team at Coda to think about how to support our ultimate vision of being the all-in-one platform for businesses.Our core product team started with an observation: Coda AI is a valuable work assistant primarily because Coda serves as a single source of truth for so many teams. They noted that one of our customer’s most common descriptions of Coda was that of an essential team hub that housed all the data and workflows in a single place. Our product team focused in on taking the next step on this promise and landed on three key features: one that happens to be the most requested feature in Coda, and two that no customer ever asked for but turned out to be totally magical. 😄
Let’s start with our top customer request.Packs can do amazing things with other tools in your tech stack. They’re often used for pulling data into Coda and intermixing it with other information. Or taking action in other systems. For example, we’ve seen teams pull Salesforce data into Coda to keep account information up to-date, link calendars to prioritize each day, and then run analysis on deal velocity, rep productivity, and so on.But there’s one major thing that Packs couldn’t do until now: two-way sync with another system. Until now, you couldn’t edit external data in a sync table and have the updates flow back into your other apps—you were stuck with a gray bubble around each cell showing that you can’t edit directly.Over the past year, we’ve rebuilt the Pack sync mechanism to natively support two-way sync. So now you can two-way sync from Salesforce, Google Sheets, Jira, GitHub, Airtable, Linear, etc., and make changes inline which will push back up to the source application. By the way, for Cross-doc fans, this includes syncing Coda tables across multiple docs.This lets your single source of truth be your holistic view and the place you can directly update all your relevant information.Two-way sync is available today as a public beta, and we’re expanding the list of supported Packs as quickly as possible. If you have feedback or a use case you want prioritized, please let us know. Oh, and for Pack creators, you can now add two-way sync as well. Here’s the on how.
At one of our Hackathons last year, a team prototyped an unexpected idea. They noticed that one of the most simple but powerful features in Coda is the page list. Many customers describe it as spreadsheet tabs turned sideways (I have no idea why spreadsheets have a monopoly on tabs, we thought that was stupid). For many customers, this trusty left-hand pane forms the spine of how they organize their teams and workflows. The team proposed an idea: What if you could embed any other product as a tab in the page list?They silently turned the feature on for our Coda workspace, and it immediately took off. All of a sudden, teams were embedding all sorts of products in their docs. We decided to turn full-page embeds into a proper feature and work with a number of partners to refine the embed experience.With Coda 4.0, you can reference the content you need without leaving your Coda doc by embedding live pages from thousands of applications. For example, your team hub can embed the Figma file with your latest design mocks and the Mode dashboard that tracks your feature usage. Your team no longer needs to hunt across dozens of tabs to find their most important information.This idea didn’t appear on any feature request list, but trust me, now that it’s there, your team won’t be able to live without it.
Sometimes unexpected ideas lead to even more unexpected ideas—a surprise within a surprise. As we watched full-page embeds take off across early-adopting customers, we tracked which applications were most commonly embedded. Many are what you would expect, but there was a surprising item on the list. One of the most common embeds was...Coda.We started asking customers why they were doing this. They reflected on a core challenge they were having with Coda—they loved the ability to organize their teams into a single space, but they often had content that could easily live in multiple places. And our current information model forced every page to live in a single doc.The initial version of this feature, while powerful, didn’t feel quite right. Coda embedded in Coda layered tool bars, page lists, and menus in an awkward way. So the team decided to turn this into a native feature called sync pages.We’re seeing our early testers use sync pages for all sorts of things. One team embedded their company values and rituals in every major doc. Another company asked every team to create a summary page in their respective hubs, and pull those summaries into a central executive home so that everyone could stay up to date without jumping through each team’s space. And we saw client-facing teams set up docs from multiple clients while still being able to pull the relevant summaries back into a central hub.[Note for the Coda enthusiasts: This surprise, unrequested feature is actually step two of four on the roadmap to another heavily requested feature: sub-doc sharing. Read about the plan
Over the past few years, I’ve watched Coda evolve from a team-level tool to a business-wide platform. A common phrase I hear is, “Coda is the operating system of our company.”With Coda 4.0, we wanted to take all the insights from these customers and turn them into ready-to-use solutions. So we interviewed hundreds of companies and studied their most important rituals. We took our learnings and built them out into thoughtful, comprehensive handbooks. Each is essentially a step-by-step guide and the key templates for how to implement Coda with your teams.
Discover the best rituals and solutions for every department with handbooks:
Some of the best teams in the world use Coda, so we’ve learned a thing or two about how to solve tricky problems:
The transition to a Coda operating system sometimes starts with migrating from another product. This allows teams to simplify and automate their core workflows while also consolidating tools, which saves them money and time.
Shavings make a pile.In addition to the big updates above, the Coda team has been working hard to address dozens of our customers’ most common requests. With millions of makers, these updates cover a wide variety of areas and use cases. You can see a full list of every update in , but here’s a quick summary of my favorites, grouped by key scenarios:
One more thing...All of the businesses that run on Coda started in the same way, with a single maker inspired to make something new. Coda has always had a Free plan so those makers could explore Coda and build out solutions before onboarding their teams. We decided to make getting started even easier—we’re removing doc size limits from the Free plan for all personal docs. So now you can safely start your Coda journey with unlimited rows and objects, for free. for updates on our new Free plan, Coda AI pricing, and an update on paid Doc Maker definitions.It’s been an amazing journey building Coda 4.0, and it wouldn’t be possible without all of your support and feedback. I hope you’ll continue to let us know what’s working, what’s missing, and what you can’t wait to see next. And if you’d like to talk about how Coda 4.0 can be the all-in-one platform for your business, .Thanks!
Shishir
Welcome to Coda 4.0: The all-in-one platform for businesses, now with AI.
Coda 4.0 introduces a connected AI work assistant, solution handbooks for every department, and dozens of key new features including 2-way sync and sync pages.
Coda AI: The connected work assistant that knows your company.
1. Knowledge assistance that understands your work (not just what’s on the internet).
2. Writing assistance that acts as an omnipresent, informed AI collaborator (not a separate experience).
3. Task assistance that can take real action at scale (not just answer questions).
Oh, and Coda AI is included for Doc Makers (not a separate charge).
Becoming the true single source of truth: Two-way sync, full-page embeds, sync pages.
Two-way sync: Packs can now read and write to your favorite tools.
Full-page embeds: Bring all your applications into a unified space for your team.
Sync pages: The content you need, everywhere at once.
.]Building your operating system on Coda: The ultimate Coda handbook for every team.
Solutions for every department
Solutions for hard problems
What about my other tools?
You asked, we delivered: Dozens of improvements to our core use cases.
Even easier to start: A free-er Free plan.
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