#231: How Zapier Is Building an AI Marketing Brain

**Dan Slagen** (0:00)
At the moment, I don't feel like learning the next tool or the next thing is where I need the team to go. You've learned what you need to learn at this point. Now, are you gonna take it upon yourself to change the way you work or not?

**Mike Kaput** (0:12)
Welcome to AI Transformations, a special series from The Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'll be your host. Every business's AI journey looks different. In each of these episodes, I sit down with leaders who have lived the real AI transformation, including the actual stories, the pain points that push them to act, the moment things started to click, and the results they can point to today. So join us as we accelerate AI literacy for all, as part of our AI Transformations series.
Welcome everyone to episode 231 of The Artificial Intelligence Show. I am Mike Kaput, co-host of The Artificial Intelligence Show and Chief Content Officer here at SmarterX. Now, you might start to understand that today's episode is a little different than your regularly scheduled programming. This is a special episode in a limited series we're running called AI Transformations presented by Google Cloud. So in this series, we are spotlighting how real companies are driving real change using AI. In each of these episodes, we'll explore how leaders at some of the world's top companies are actively using AI to transform how their teams, departments, or even entire organizations work. And we're looking at things like what sparked their transformation, what work looked like before AI, how their journeys unfolded. Sometimes we'll talk about what got messy along the way. And we'll, of course, talk about what results AI is starting to unlock for the business. We're doing all that with a bit of a different format than our typical episodes, which is interviewing these leaders first hand right here on the show, including the leader here joining me today, Dan Slagen from Zapier. Much more on Dan in just a minute here. But just a little more context into this series before we dive in. We are doing this in partnership with our good friends at Google Cloud for a simple reason, which is often AI transformation can feel abstract. Everyone's kind of talking about it, but far fewer people are showing what this looks like in practice inside real companies. So the goal of these episodes is hopefully to make AI transformation much more concrete for you. We want you to hear how other leaders are approaching it, what they're learning, and what practical lessons you can apply as you think about AI in your own organization. And if you are a regular podcast listener, don't worry, me and Paul will still be back doing our regular weekly episode of the show. Paul and Kathy are still doing their AI answers episode, so nothing here really changes, except you get even more episodes of the Artificial Intelligence Show thanks to this series. So with that, let me get right into this. So today's episode is brought to you by Gemini Enterprise. Businesses of every shape and size are turning to AI. They're learning how to move faster, do more, and improve their performance. But you can't just hand your data over to any platform. You need a trusted partner with years of experience. And that's where Gemini Enterprise comes in.
Gemini Enterprise helps you build sophisticated AI agents that can connect with your business data while also keeping it protected by world class security and governance. So no more compromising between performance and protection. You can go get started with Gemini Enterprise today at cloud.google.com/geminidashenterprise.
That's cloud.google.com/geminidashenterprise.
All right. So super excited for today's episode. Today we are talking with Dan Slagen, the Chief Marketing and AI Transformation Officer at Zapier. Now Zapier, you probably know of it, is one of the defining companies in automation. For years, they've been helping businesses connect the apps they use every day and automate repetitive work all without needing engineers. Now, as AI is changing what software can do, Zapier is building around a bigger idea, AI orchestration, where AI tools, agents, workflows, models, data and business apps all work together so AI can actually take action. Dan is here because Zapier's marketing team is living that type of transformation from the inside. We'll talk all about this, but at the end of last year, Dan says his team looked like a normal, ahead of the curve marketing team on AI. People had access to the expected tools and they were using them. But by early this year, in 2026, he saw a more important shift coming. Marketers were no longer just going to be judged by how well they used AI chat tools. They were going to be competing with people who could use AI builder tools like Cursor, Codex, Quadcode and Zapier's MCP to build their own apps, dashboards, workflows and even digital twins. So in February, Dan called a Code Red to get the marketing organization not just AI savvy but AI native. And since then, Zapier's marketing team has been moving from AI adoption into AI native work. Team members have built and named their own digital twins. They've started working in builder tools. They've begun creating systems that change how marketing work gets done. We'll even talk about how Zapier has started developing its own AI-powered marketing brain, a shared department level system meant to centralize the freshest context across Zapier's market, customers, competitors, campaigns and more. It then gives the team's AI tools and agents the current context they need to help create, plan and execute work. Dan, welcome to the show. I'd love to get into it with you. Thanks for being here for one.