No Code Is Code: Zapier CEO Wade Foster on Headless Tools, Zapier MCP & Automation Bench

Nathan Labenz (0:00)

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to welcome Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, back to the show. When I last spoke to Wade in September of 2024, some 400,000 customers had already used Zapier to delegate more than 100 million tasks to AI. And YC President Gary Tan was calling Zapier the AI-powered knowledge worker of the future.

Since then, models have of course become dramatically more capable, and Zapier has built out a full AI portfolio, including agents, chatbots, an MCP server, an SDK and an AI guardrails product. And yet, somehow, white-collar work and the world as a whole have changed much less than I would have expected. With that in mind, I wanted to hear not only about what Zapier has built and how it's continued to evolve as a company, but what Wade and team have learned about how businesses across the economy understand and use today's AI tools.

At a high level, Wade believes that most people are now settling in to using a single daily driver, whether that's Claude Code, ChatGPT, Grokbot, or in Wade's case, Cursor. And that platforms like Zapier will need to adapt by making their tools available and effective in those environments.

Practically, he observes that models still struggle with many business tasks, as illustrated by Astra setting a new high of just 40% success on Zapier's AutomationBench, which consists of roughly 600 knowledge work tasks across marketing, sales, HR, and operations. He also argues that many tasks that people are delegating to AI would be better done with deterministic code, and that for a while longer at least, there is therefore tremendous ROI to time invested in structuring and validating work flows.

We then go on to discuss what Zapier is doing to help people recognize exactly what AI might be able to do for them. Starting with his own weekly automation, which Wade says they will soon productize for customers, that reviews his activity across Gmail, Slack, the browser, Cursor and more, and then proposes specific tools and work flows that he should be building.

We also talk about how Zapier is implementing recursive self-improvement loops internally and how much value they're finding in running multiple different AIs on the same problem. Why Wade chose to put Zapier's Chief People Officer in charge of AI transformation, but wouldn't necessarily recommend that strategy to other companies. How Zapier is moving toward public by default communications to make more and more context available to AIs. Why they still don't limit individuals use of AI, but have created dashboards to help employees better understand and manage their own usage. How Zapier, which holds a huge number of high-value user credentials, is thinking about security in the context of rapidly rising cybersecurity risks. And finally, how Wade thinks about co-authorship between humans and AIs. With the upshot being that he believes individuals should use AI to help improve their writing and shouldn't be afraid of being pangrammed, but also that it's critical that people be prepared to explain and stand behind the work that they ship.

With that, I hope you enjoy this very grounded and highly practical conversation about making AI automation work for people outside the AI bubble. With Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier. The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by Mercury, the fintech that more than 300,000 ambitious companies and individuals trust to run their finances. I've wired AI into nearly every corner of my life. My email, my messages, my calendar. I even gave Mercury virtual cards to my agents, with low limits and category and merchant restrictions, for their autonomous use. But still, my AI's access to my financial data has remained limited. With a normal bank, I might export a bunch of statements and have my assistant process them for me. But for real time, up-to-date information, and certainly for taking any action, trying to get your agent to use the bank via the browser is just too hard, too slow, and too error-prone to be worth it. And that's why Mercury's new conversational interface, Command, is such a big deal. It's built directly into Mercury, which means you get natural language access to your finances without exposing anything outside of your bank account. No exports, no spreadsheets, no pasting your transactions into third-party tools.

I really think a lot of people are going to prefer it this way. And it can already help you take actions too, with everything bound by the permissions and approval policies that you've already set up in your account. I am genuinely impressed to see this level of AI integration in banking in 2026 And so I invite you to join me in the future. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA. Members FDIC. Thank you to Mercury for supporting The Cognitive Revolution. And now, on with the show. Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier. Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.