Zapier’s CEO shares his personal AI stack | Wade Foster

0:00So many CEOs sending these memos. We want you to do 10 times more work using these magical tools.

0:06Wade Foster:You go figure it out. I see a lot of CEOs fall to the delegation trap. They write the AI memo. They say, hey, we're going to go do this. And then they don't do anything else. They ask their exec team who asks a director on their team, who asks a manager on their team, who asks an IC on the team. And then that poor IC is like, am I figuring this out for the whole company? It's like, do you think that's going to go well for that person or for your org? And it's like, no, not really. And so I think it's really important for leaders to do hackathons, to do show and tells, whatever you want to call them, whatever you want to do.

0:33Wade Foster:But you do need to provide a little bit of play space for the organization to get comfortable with it. And then once people put their hands on the tools, I find that some of the fear goes away. You've actually put these rubrics together that allow you to identify how do you build AI fluency as a PM at these different levels. And I think that exercise is so effective because people change around what gets rewarded and what gets measured. There is so many tasks that are not economically valuable right now. And these are the areas where AI and agents really thrive.

1:08Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have a very special episode with Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier. Wade's going to show us how CEOs can do more than send emails to their teams about how they should adopt AI. Instead, he's going to pop open his screen and show us how he uses Meeting Notes, Zapier, and believe it or not, Grok to find, hire, and inspire talent across the company. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Brex. If you're listening to this show, you already know AI is changing how we work in real, practical ways.

1:51Brex is bringing that same power to finance. Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for founders. With autonomous agents running in the background, your finance stack basically runs itself. Cards are issues, expenses are filed, and fraud is stopped in real time without you having to think about it. Add Brex's banking solution with a high-yield treasury account, and you've got a system that helps you spend smarter, move faster, and scale with confidence. One in three startups in the U.S. already runs on Brex. You can too at brex.com slash howiai. Wade, thanks for joining How I AI. Why I am so excited to have you here is I think Zapier has done one of the most exceptional jobs, not just leaning into adding AI into their product, but really thinking about how AI transforms a company and how people do work there.

2:54And today we have a really exciting show where we're going to show how you think about AI talent, AI fluency, interviewing for AI, and even finding some AI-pilled talent out there that you can pull into the org. So before we get into it, why have you leaned in so hard into changing how your team works, who you hire and what you reward inside the company?

3:19Wade Foster:A couple of reasons. I think one, for the same reason that everybody's doing it, which it feels like this is a transformative technology that allows us to ship and deliver just like a whole bunch more value to our customers. So that's first and foremost. Second, our product does a lot of this stuff. And I would be embarrassed if we're out there evangelizing how this stuff can change how you work. And internally, we're doing none of it. And so when I talk to our team, I'm like, I want us to be on the forefront of using this stuff. And that should mean that we are going to try things and we're going to make mistakes.

4:02Wade Foster:But even when we make mistakes, that's really good because we can now go out and share those mistakes and say, hey, we tried this thing that everybody was, you know, talking was so great. And, you know, either it was great for us or actually it didn't really work for us. Like we couldn't figure it out. And I think that has helped people feel a little bit more comfortable, you know, just pushing on these things. It also helps that one of our core values is don't be a robot, build a robot. So like we're just we're probably just like more predisposed compared to most companies to get into these things.

4:33Well, and one of the things that I hear a lot from people is they get a lot of anxiety sometimes when they're hearing these messages from their leaders about how they need to change how they do work or how they think about their job. and they say, I'm so busy, I don't have time or I just don't know where to get started. It doesn't practically apply. And where I've been able to crack kind of people is I think you are doing your teammates a huge service by investing in them getting these skills because the challenge I give to most people is I say, okay, let's say you've had a wonderful run at whatever company you're at and I know you're gonna be here forever, but maybe in a couple of years you decide you're up for a new adventure.

5:15What do you think that interview is going to look like? What do you think they're going to screen for in two or three years? And do you think this is going to be part of how you're evaluated? And they almost consistently say, absolutely, yes. And then I say, then you're very lucky to be at a company who wants you to be on the leading edge in terms of adopting these tools and technologies and processes in your work. So I think it's not only the right thing to do for a business, but I actually think it's the right thing to do for employees and people as part of a team.

5:44Wade Foster:I 100 % agree. I see a lot of CEOs fall to like the delegation trap. They write the AI memo. They say, hey, we're going to go do this. And then they don't do anything else. They ask their exec team who asked a director on their team, who asked a manager on their team, who asked an IC on the team. And then that poor IC is like, am I figuring this out for the whole company? It's like, do you think that's going to go well for that person or for your org? And it's like, no, not really. And so I think it's really important for leaders to do hackathons, to do show and tells, to do Friday afternoon, you know, mess around, whatever you want to call them, whatever you want to do.

6:19Wade Foster:But you do need to provide a little bit of play space for the organization to get comfortable with it. And then once people put their hands on the tools, I find that some of the fear goes away. It's so natural because the media would have you believe that this stuff is terrifying. But for those of us who are messing around with it, you see how awesome it is, but you also see the flaws. You're like, oh, it's not so good at this. It's really good at this. I'm going to lean into it over here. And then my role is actually doing these other tasks now. And so it becomes a lot more pragmatic versus this like boogeyman in the closet that's going to come for your job.

6:51I agree. And then the last thing I'll give you a little kudos on is you've made this very tangible for your team. So we have a lot of, for example, product managers in the How I AI audience, and you've actually put these rubrics together that allow you to identify how do you build AI fluency as a PM at these different levels. And I think that exercise is so effective because people chain around what gets rewarded and what gets measured. And by making it very specific, people can invest in specific skills and tools and know where, you know, the goalposts are. And so you've actually used AI to both like make those and make them better.

7:28And I think that's where we're going to start with our first workflow.

7:30Wade Foster:So the first thing I want to show, we're going to talk about recruiting day. I spent a lot of time on recruiting. I've got this doc here, which is, you know, probably most of your companies have like something like this, which is, you know, like a values document. Most of them, I don't think, put like a ton of effort into it. But I think it's really helpful when you start to have a document that's like written well for an AI to understand like what is good and bad behavior. I think you actually had an episode with Hillary that did a version of this where it was like, you know, default to action.

8:04Wade Foster:Okay, what does that actually mean? Like, here's examples of do this, not this. And it helps the AI sort of get really good at these types of things. So we had a document like this for forever that helps us with our rubrics. And so when you think about hiring somebody, you want to have clear evaluation criteria. Now, this we put together long, long ago, but I have a hack for how you can do this, even if you haven't thought about this. And so the hack that I have for this one is if you use Granola, Granola launched this feature called Recipes, which are just fancy prompts, basically. And I did not think of this idea.

8:49Wade Foster:This is something that was just in their library, which was genius. I've been using Granola for most of the year, I think, almost a year now. And one of the prompts they have is, yeah, build the unspoken company culture handbook. So you can see it actually starts to say how the organization works, at least according to my meetings. And I have it on in every single meeting. So people really know at least how Wade works and the meetings in and around Wade works. and you get this like pretty rich example of what your company's doing. And so if you're using a tool like Granola, if you're using any of these meeting recorders, I think you can run a prompt like this to actually extract the real culture of the company.

9:34Wade Foster:And so you can see what it rewards. You can see what it doesn't reward. And the first time I ran this, I was like, I was shocked. I was like, we spend a lot of time thinking about our culture, writing about our culture, and I think we do a better job than most. But as I read through it, I was like, wow, this actually gets at the specifics in a way that even I hadn't figured out quite how to do. And so I think this is kind of the magic of AI, especially if you're using a tool like Granola or something to collect data over long periods of time. then AI gets really powerful because you can just like slap a prompt on the top of it and it can generate something like this that now becomes really practical for a whole host of reasons.

10:21Wade Foster:You can now put it into job descriptions. You can now use it as part of hiring and firing. You can set expectations really well. So this is a tool I would use. I would take the output of this now And I would go give it to a tool like ChatGPT and say, hey, can you take this like unspoken culture and actually generate a set of like scoring prompts for how to evaluate somebody in an interview against these traits that match that here? Well, and what I want to call out for the CEOs or other executives here are is, you know, a lot of CEOs talk about culture and our operating principles and how, you know, who we want to hire for and how we want to hire.

11:02But you do have this rich, unstructured data. Most of us do just a bunch of granola, which is how your team actually speaks to each other and operates in the day to day. And taking this data and not using it for functional purposes, although we've seen lots of functional purposes of this, taking sales calls and getting salespeople coaching, taking product debates and turning them to documents, but actually taking the aggregate of all your company communications and stress testing it against your stated values is really interesting because then you can see, well, where are we aligned with our values?

11:39where do things show up that we haven't actually clearly articulated that we want to reinforce and document and do all these things and like where are we actually off like we say we xyz but then if we really look at how we speak to each other we do a lot of abc and i just think so many ceos again are like sending these memos like we want you to do 10 times more work using these magical tools. You go figure it out, but aren't spending the time to figure out how to maybe even do the CEO job better. And I'm sure you think of yourself as the carrier of culture at your company. And so why not use these tools that weren't available before to do that?

12:21And then you can use AI to turn these into all sorts of assets, as you said, job descriptions, discussions, performance rubrics, all hands content, all that kind of stuff that I think is really interesting. And we have, not to spoil it, we have an episode coming either before or after. We'll see when it gets scheduled with your EA, Courtney, who holds your executive team's feet to the fire on how they perform in meetings relative to your values. So it's not just about, you know, eye of Sauron from across the organization. You do turn it upon yourself as well.

12:58Wade Foster:Yeah, I think so. I think what you're talking about is we have like coaching bots and a lot of meetings and stuff like this. And I love it, honestly, because I as a CEO, I want to get lots of feedback because of power dynamics and stuff. You don't always get like just the honest truth. And AI is this infinitely patient coach. And so it's just fantastic. And be like, hey, here's some things I think you're doing great. Good job. And like, here's three things that candidly you're not doing a great job of. You don't always have to agree with it, but it's really helpful. It just making me better at my job.

13:28Wade Foster:And I think most people want that. Like most people want more feedback than their manager or their peers or whoever have time to give them. And AI has all the time in the world to give you feedback. Okay, so you have your values document, you've shown us how we could create maybe or infer some values from some sources of data that weren't available before. But then let's talk a little bit about hiring. So again, CEO job, carry, carry values, culture, you know, drive pace in the organization, hire great people. So you spent a lot of time on hiring. And how has AI come into how you manage some parts of the hiring process that were maybe a little bit more tedious or harder to scale before?

14:12Wade Foster:One of the places that I really like to use it is as like an assistant for interviews. So I, again, I use Granola a lot. So I have built an agent that will help, will basically evaluate my transcripts and my notes and will help me make a yes, no decision on how to hire this person. So what we're looking at here is Zapier Agents, This is a pretty simple agent here. So you can see over here, it triggers when there's a note added to a folder in Granola. In this case, if we look in it, it's an interview agent whenever it adds an interview to my new interviews folder. And the way Zapier agents work is you can give them a set of instructions to follow.

15:00Wade Foster:And so in this case, you know, the instructions are you're an expert hiring evaluator at Zapier. Your task is to review the interview transcript and notes provided by Granola. you're reviewing the job description provided as a knowledge source and Zapier's company values provided as a knowledge source to determine whether a candidate should advance in the hiring process. You want to evaluate the candidate's functional expertise, their values alignment, so on and so forth. So you run through all the things that you want this agent to do. And then ultimately, I give it a goal. And the goal here is, hey, I want you to recommend yes, no, or maybe to this candidate.

15:32Wade Foster:And then I want you to provide your reasoning. Give me three to five sentences on why you think you should do what you, why you are recommending this, then I want you to go ahead and email me the evaluation. And inside Zapier Agents, you can upload those knowledge sources. So you can see down here, I have two Google Docs, the Zapier Values rubric. And in this case, we're looking at a social media job description. So we're in the process of hiring someone to help out with our social. And so there's a job description associated with this. So this is a very simple agent now that for any of these interviews I'm doing with this, I will get, in addition to my own opinion, I will get an AI opinion alongside of this.

16:11Wade Foster:I really like this because it acts as like a bias check. It acts as a thought partner. You know, especially for me, who's interviewing people across all sorts of disciplines, all sorts of areas. You know, I usually know a little bit about a lot of things, But it's nice to have another tool kind of gut checking me on some of these things and giving me extra little tips and tricks and nuggets to go, oh, that actually was interesting. I should pay more attention to that. So we should actually see what this looks like for a candidate. But I want to do one thing real quick. So let me show you how Copilot works if you want to go change this.

16:50Wade Foster:So in this case, I actually just got off an interview with a candidate and I want to show the output of it, but I don't want to have any PII leak demo like this. So we're going to have Copilot get rid of that. So let's say change the prompt to remove any identifiable information about the candidate. And so the nice thing about how Zapier Agents Copilot works is it'll help you write these instructions. You don't have to sit down and write all these, come up with all these instructions yourself. You can give it kind of just, hey, basic guidelines, and then Copilot will go generate all of that stuff for you.

17:34Wade Foster:And then you can just edit the instructions directly if you want to. Yeah. And I'm going to go ahead and give, I'm going to give your team's product folks or whoever design folks a lot of kudos because I use both Copilot and a lot of the improve my prompt little mini features inside Zapier. And I also love how you score how strong some of my prompts are in some parts of the app. And so it is, it is helpful just to have a Copilot for prompting because no matter how much people say it's, it doesn't matter. It definitely matters. Totally. Alrighty, so it's made the change. I am going to go ahead.

18:11Wade Foster:We're going to just, I didn't actually check exactly what I did. So we're just going to do this vibe style. So you can see we've got interview evaluation for a senior social media specialist. Look, it's stripped out people. And that's nice. So recommendation for this candidate is yes. Hey, job well done, candidate. You know, strong functional expertise, all alignment with Zappers valued. They have a deep understanding of social media strategy, particularly shift from product focused marketing to story building, community building. So you can see it kind of works through the job description, then it works through the values here and ultimately tries to like support the recommendation.

18:48Wade Foster:Now, one thing that I would do to make this better then is to look at the feedback here and go, okay, how can I update the prompt to give me even more actionable recommendations? Like if I felt like, you know, hey, this evaluator is like being too easy on candidates or too hard on candidates. I would basically go through the same system that Hillary shows off with her GPTs, which is like provide more suggestions, more details on. This is a good answer. This is a bad answer. And over time, you'll find that your interview agent starts to get really good at assessing candidates. So I'm going to give you two enhancements that I think you should make.

19:30Oh, I love it.

19:30Wade Foster:flow. One is one that Zach Davis at LaunchDarkly showed in his interview flow, which is he actually evaluates the quality of the interviewer during the session against the rubric. And so there could be a feedback for interviewer section at the end that says, hey, you actually forgot to ask about XYZ or when going into topic, you didn't really reinforce this. And so next time you interview, you remember to do ABC. We did this for engineering interviews at LaunchDark because, you know, humans get into conversations and we forget exactly what we're going to ask and it becomes a very natural flow.

20:07So give yourself a interview coach in your feedback channel. The other thing is, man, I just want that yes, no, maybe in the subject line.

20:19Wade Foster:People like interview candidate, yes, move forward. Because the most important thing I say, you know, how I win good talent is I just, I want to hire them harder than ever than everybody else. That's one of my secret paths. So like the sooner you're like, this is a yes, let's prioritize reading that. Let's get the candidate to the next stage. You can get a little aggressive on talent acquisition. So those are my two pieces of feedback. And we are seeing right here, Wade is live using co-pilot to add those suggestions into the overall prompt. And what I like about agents is I think this concept of agents has been very opaque to a lot of people in terms of like, what can they even do?

21:03What does this mean? Do I have to like do these, you know, fancy flow connectors, which are available in your product? But really what I say is just like, if you were to explain to somebody how to do this job in steps, and what they would need to get that job done, write it down. And that is that is the definition of your agent. And then these these AI tools can execute them. And then And of course, you know, features like Copilot or like Enhance My Prompt can then go make it a little bit more structured for how the AI models would read those instructions. But it's basically like just describe what you want to get done.

21:36Wade Foster:Yeah, I think a way I often describe it is if you've ever seen standard operating procedures, you've seen an agent. And, you know, the folks that are great at writing standard operating procedures are fantastic at building agents. But even if you're not great at writing standard operating procedures, this is where Copilot helps you out so much because you can just blab in, can you do this thing for me? And it starts to go, okay, I get your idea, but here's what standard operating procedure for that should actually look like. And then it's awesome to, you know, sit down and talk to someone like Claire who goes, here's two other ideas to make this better.

22:13Wade Foster:And then you can just go tell Copilot to make it better. I find the real challenge with AI, at least at this point in time, is less about the tools and more about just coming with ideas for like, how do you make this stuff better? And once you have the ideas, it's crazy fast to implement it. Like those two suggestions took literally 60 seconds to add to this and they're great suggestions. Yeah, so if you want them to know the Clairvaux magic secret to suggestions on what your AI can do, one of the mistakes I see people make when they do agents is they think, what do I do? And let's just do what I do.

22:44And I say, that's a great place to start. What I do and how I do it. But then I say, but then ask yourself, if I had more time, what would I do next? And what would I do after that? And if I had three interns on this, what would they do? And I say, like, pull that thread a little further along and imagine doing this task. You would do it to the nth degree and you would have maybe interns or additional resources and sort of infinite time to take it to the next level. And I think Matt at Susie showed us this on a very similar flow, Granola to a more structured workflows app. Where he said, okay, if I had a sales call and my marketing team operated perfectly off that sales call, what are the 15 things that they would do?