Zapier's AI Revolution: From No-Code Pioneer to LLM Knowledge Worker

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together, we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a B2B SaaS application, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication, SCIM provisioning, role-based access control, and audit trails. That's where WorkOS comes in. With easy-to-use and flexible APIs that help you ship enterprise features on day one without slowing down your core product development. Today, some of the hottest startups in the world are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Perplexity, Vercel, Jasper, and Webflow. WorkOS also provides a generous free tier of up to 1 million monthly active users for user management, making it the perfect authentication and authorization solution for growing companies. It comes standard with rich features like bot protection, MFA, roles and permissions, and more. If you're currently looking to build SSO for your first enterprise customer, you should consider using WorkOS. Integrate in minutes and start shipping enterprise plans today.
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, the automation platform that's been a no-code pioneer since its founding in 2011 Zapier has long been known as an easy way to connect apps and automate workflows. But as Wade explains, they're now pursuing a much bigger vision, to be, as Y Combinator president Gary Tan recently put it, the AI-powered knowledge worker of the future. In this conversation, Wade shares insights into how Zapier is embracing AI in their product and also adapting to AI as a company. More than 400,000 customers have already delegated more than 100 million tasks to AI through Zapier. And Wade highlights some of the most common and also some of the most original use cases. From AI-powered lead qualification and SDR-style outreach, to a voice memo to invoice system that one customer built for his wife's small landscaping business. We also explore how Zapier, like so many other companies right now, is evolving its own product strategy, moving from a DIY platform to a done-for-you-by-AI platform with AI functionality woven throughout. While the AI functions that design Zaps are still a work in progress, it's clear that Zapier hopes to lower the barriers to entry by allowing anyone to design new workflows with a natural language interface. Along the way, we also touch on the challenges of decomposing tasks that are intuitive for humans into the sort of discreet steps that AI can handle effectively. Zapier's strategy for encouraging AI adoption internally, including their very founder mode decision to stop work across the entire company for a week-long AI hackathon after GPT-4 was released last year, Wade's tips for effective prompting and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with current models, and his perspective on the state of AI progress since GPT-4 and how that relates to his co-founder and previous guest Mike Knoup's perspective on progress toward AGI more generally. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends or write us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget, you can always share your feedback or suggestions via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. Now, I hope you enjoy this inside look at AI-powered automation at scale with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Wade Foster** (3:46)
Yeah. Thanks for having me, Nathan.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:48)
I'm excited for this. You guys obviously have built a very well-known company in the no-code space, one of the early category definers. And I wanted to start off with just big picture stuff about the company, and then definitely we'll have a chance to go deep on some of the AI products and features and cultural adaptations that I'm sure that you're dealing with over the last couple of years. For starters, obviously, the competition has grown up around you, right? As they've seen your success. How would you describe Zapier today in an increasingly crowded market? What's the key competitive advantage? Why do people choose you? Why is Zapier still leading in the space?

**Wade Foster** (4:22)
You're right. There is a lot more options forever, which I think is good for everybody to have that. But I think the thing that Zapier still does better than everyone else is it's just so easy to get started with. It's not hard to come in and go like, you know what? I want to make a new payment from Stripe post into Slack. I want to take this attachment I get in from Gmail and push this into Dropbox and just start with these real basic integrations and just start to get your wheels turning. And then I think the thing that we have increasingly been doing at Zapier is saying, hey, it's not just integrations. It's how do you really build a full-blown automation platform out of this stuff? And so more and more folks get started with Zapier on these easy things, but then find that the depth of the platform just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And so they end up just being able to do more and more with Zapier, and it's not necessary to go look for other things to solve an increasing amount of problems at the end of the day. And so I think that easy to get started and just more depth for use, like just keeps people in and around the ecosystem.