#2299 Zapier is using AI to sell to AI

**Andrew Warner** (0:00)
Are you marketing to agents now?

**Wade Foster** (0:01)
The agent is actually choosing what products to buy on behalf of a human. And so, you're no longer advertising to the human, you are trying to get the agent to say, pick me, pick me, pick me.

**Andrew Warner** (0:13)
Is SaaS dead?

**Wade Foster** (0:14)
Our CPTO VibeCoded, like a meeting recording software. It's a cool proof of concept, but we're not canceling our subscriptions anytime soon to our meeting recording software.

**Andrew Warner** (0:23)
You have a Claude skill that helps you lead.

**Wade Foster** (0:25)
He calls it his war council. What this skill is, is if you have a particular problem or a decision you're making, you can just say, hey, I want to invoke the war council to advise me on this.

**Andrew Warner** (0:35)
Do a screen share. Let's see how you work.

**Wade Foster** (0:37)
Sure. Okay, here we go.

**Andrew Warner** (0:39)
Wade Foster is the founder of Zapier, the AI automation company. The next new thing.
You told me about someone who you hired recently who impressed you, this agent marketing guy. What's agent marketing?

**Wade Foster** (0:53)
Well, so I think this is a new thing that folks on the cutting edge are paying attention to, which is the agent is actually choosing what products to buy on behalf of a human. And so you're no longer advertising to the human, you are trying to get the agent to say, pick me, pick me, pick me. And that is often a very different skill set than marketing to a human. With human, there's all sorts of like advertising history around like consumer psychology and like how do you position these things. And the way an agent makes a decision is somewhat different than how a human makes this decision. And so, you know, this person is building all sorts of tools to like track like, you know, when does ChatGBT recommend this tool or not? When does like, you know, Claude recommend this or that? And why do they recommend it? And then trying to figure out how do you like, you know, structure your content, structure your API, structure your CLI tools such that, you know, more often than not, it's going to say, oh, when I have this problem, I want to go use that vendor versus that other vendor.

**Andrew Warner** (1:52)
You know what? I had that experience. I used Claude Code and I said, okay, now how do I publish it? It said, I can just publish it to Versel. I go, I never heard of Versel before, but okay, go ahead if that's what you can do. And I did it. And then a few days later, I was at a CloudFlare event and they talked about how they can do the same thing, but better. And I said, wait, I would have preferred all those features, but I had no idea you even existed. So what are you finding that is effective for marketing to agents?

**Wade Foster** (2:18)
Well, so agents care a ton about clean documentation, fast web pages. So the thing I'm seeing a lot of folks do is serve up a separate version of their web page that is meant just for the agent. And so that content is like plain text. It's served up really fast. It's written very descriptive, almost like mechanical because that's what the agent prefers. It's like, I want to have just like, give me just the facts in an easy to consume way. Very clear, very direct. And as a result, it's able to understand what you're offering much better. Whereas a human cares a ton about the design, like the visual design and things like that. Agent, it's not so much. Right? So it's a different, you just kind of have to like figure out like, what is the thing that it's actually optimizing? And I'll be honest, like a lot of this is, you know, very much like a more art than science right now. Yes, people are building evals and, you know, things like that to kind of track it.
But yeah, when you ask like people who are really good at this, their answers are like very hand-waving still.

**Andrew Warner** (3:33)
So what did he say or do that made you think, okay, he's got this?

**Wade Foster** (3:37)
Well, I think just the level of experimentation is just much, much more.

**Andrew Warner** (3:41)
He's experimenting so much.

**Wade Foster** (3:42)
Exactly.

**Andrew Warner** (3:43)
But how do you even figure it out, Wade? You do a test. It takes a while for the agent to even know that you existed, let alone to know that you've made the change. What do you do to test and know quickly?