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 used Zapier to delegate more than 100 million tasks to AI, and YC president Garry 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… 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 AI tools. At a high level, Wade believes that most people are settling into using a single "daily driver" – whether that's Claude Code, ChatGPT for Work, 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 Automation Bench, which consists of roughly 600 knowledge-work tasks across marketing, sales, HR, and operations – and he argues that many tasks that people are delegating to AIs would be better done with deterministic code, and that, for a while longer at least, there is tremendous ROI to time invested in structuring and validating workflows. We go on discuss what Zapier is doing to help people recognize exactly what AI might be able 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 workflows he should build. We also discuss: - how Zapier is implementing recursive self-improvement loops internally, and how much value they find in running multiple different AI models 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 work generally, and shouldn't be afraid of being Pangram'd, but also that it's critical that people be prepared to explain and stand behind the work 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.
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Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz