🚨New release: Zapier SDK

Zapier today is giving your favorite agent, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, you name it, access to every tool that you might use. I'm going to show you how it's helping us at Zapier grow our business. Can you help me generate a Sunday outreach email to the 10 outreach accounts? Draft them in Gmail for me. So now it just goes and does this for me. Great. Let's just do a screen share.

We are launching the Zapier SDK into open beta. Now, this is one of those things that might seem like not such a big deal on the surface, but it is actually sneaky one of the most powerful things that I think we have ever launched at Zapier. I've been using it for the last two months and it has completely changed how I do every single task that I have. So, what is it? Well, people know Zapier because we connect to your apps. We've got this massive library, almost 10,000 apps that Zapier hooks into. Well, what the SDK does is it allows you to bring all those connections, all those tools safely into an agent harness. So if you're one of those people that's already using Claude Code or Codex or Cursor day-to-day, you hook the SDK in and now that coding agent has access to all of the tools that you connect to Zapier. Now this is powerful because even if you're not an engineer, I am not an engineer. I have written zero lines of production code in my entire life. You need to think of it as having this magical assistant that can just go do crazy amounts of work for you. And it literally has changed how I do my work. And it's pretty easy to get started. So, let me share my screen here real quick. The getting started part might feel intimidating at first, but I promise you it's pretty simple. So, you come here and this is the setup. And right here we've got this command for you. And you can just copy and paste it like this. And all you got to do is go to your agent. So you just paste it in and you hit enter and it will go install all the magical Zapier capabilities, the SDK into in this case Cursor. Now I've already done it so I'm not going to rerun the command here for us. But now you can just go do interesting things with it. So for example, let's just do a test run to make sure this works. I'm going to put on demo mode so you can't see, but I'll say, show me the last 10 mentions of Wade in Slack. Let's see. Let's get rid of this. Of Wade in Slack.

So demo mode is this cool little skill I built for myself because I show off these workflows all the time. People want to see this stuff and I want to show the real thing, but the challenge is my real stuff has all my real work in it. So I made this skill that I call demo mode and basically it allows me to run real requests, real things that I might actually do in the world. But demo mode basically rewrites it so that they're redacted or changes the names of things. So it doesn't actually show off stuff that might actually leak confidential information.

Exactly.

So MCP is a powerful tool and soon MCP will actually be the SDK under the hood. But what the SDK can do, especially when you're using an agent harness is it can run arbitrary API requests. So whereas the MCP has all the Zapier trigger and action library predefined out of the box, the SDK can say, hey, I have access to Slack's API docs. I can just go do anything I want that the Slack API allows me to do, which means it's much more flexible for a wide variety of workflows. And here you can see it's come back and shared a sanitized view of the last 10 things that have sort of popped up in Slack for me. Teammate said they need to reschedule a meeting because they have a conflict. Comms PR flagged a sensitive AI jobs question that Wade should probably look at or avoid saying. You can see here this is a simple thing that you can do which is fetch the last 10 mentions of my name in Slack but you can also build more complex workflows. So for example one of the things I wanted to start doing was build a better relationship with our enterprise customers. Now at Zapier we have HubSpot which is the CRM everybody on the team uses. But HubSpot is a very complex piece of software and I only wanted to do a very small thing which was every Sunday I wanted to go email 10 enterprise customers and just check in, see how things were going, did they have any feedback for us, how could we make the product better, etc. And logging into HubSpot felt like overkill. Plus, HubSpot isn't the only thing that has interesting information about our customers. We also have information in Databricks, which is our data warehouse. We have interesting information in Gong, which is the tool that records all of our meetings with our customers from our AEs and our CSMs. And so, I wanted to build a simple CRM that pulled all the data together into one UI and then helped me go generate emails for those customers. So, let me show it off real quick. Please open the CEO CRM. So, here you go. This is my personal CEO CRM. And it gives me a couple quick highlights at the top. The number of enterprise accounts we have, how much they're paying us. It buckets a number of accounts that need attention for whatever reason. It tells me how many accounts have a champion in them and how many of them have a real strong power user associated with them. But then it basically just lists out all these accounts and I can pop into it and I have a quick little panel that shows some more detail about the account. I wired up keyboard shortcuts so I can quickly toggle through all of them and see all of these accounts, which is nice. But the main workflow that I cared a lot about was this outreach one. In here it's got 10 recommended accounts for me to go reach out to and connect with for whatever reason. So, this is pretty handy. But, once I sort of had identified these accounts, I thought to myself, well, it's nice that I've identified the account, I'd really just like some help coming up with what I should email these accounts. And so that's where I started to say, hey, can you help me generate a Sunday outreach email to the 10 outreach accounts? Draft them in Gmail for me, please. So now it just goes and does this for me. It's incredible. It sort of has all these accounts pulled in from HubSpot, from Databricks, this context from Gong. So it has all this information about what makes these accounts interesting or not interesting. It knows why certain accounts need attention or not. It's suggesting 10 that would be useful for me to go ping and then it just says, 'All right, I'll go draft an email for me.' Now, I like having it draft an email still rather than just send the email because I still want to have myself in the loop. I still think that I write better emails than these tools do, but it usually does a good enough draft that I can just tweak a few things and be like great, send it for me. And so this system would not have been possible or easy for me without the Zapier SDK because this SDK is able to sort of pull in safely all the data from all these systems and take action in all these systems on behalf of myself.

Yeah. And you can see here right here while on the screen I found an existing prospector workflow. So prospector is the name of this workflow now. It's got the CRM short list. It's got recent touch suppression. So it's basically saying, 'Hey, here's some accounts you should not email.' I added Clay verification over time. This was because our HubSpot didn't always have up-to-date contact information. And so I use Clay to basically check, hey, does this person still work at this company? Is this person the right person in the account to reach out to? So, I added that. It has... actually let me scroll back up so I don't lose that.

Totally. You can see I've built in a Wade-style draft generation. So, this is another thing where I mentioned these things don't write emails as good as I do. So, I basically fed it a bunch of emails that I've written before and said, 'Here's how I like to write emails.' And then I built a skill that's like, 'Hey, here's how Wade likes to write emails.' I taught it how I like and then it goes and builds a signed Gmail draft. So it adds in my Gmail signature in a very specific way that I want for these outreach emails. So, you know, every step of the way, I'm basically just able to give instructions to this like I would to another human where I'd say like, 'Hey, can you make it like this? Can you do it like that?' So, I don't have to know all the underlying technology that's going on. I don't know how it's doing all this stuff. I just know that I've got an amazing coding agent inside of Cursor. And in this case, I'm using GPT 5.4. And then I've got the Zapier SDK, which allows me to hook into all these different tools and pulls data in and manipulate it in interesting ways. But I don't have to figure out how to actually solve these problems. And as a result, I find myself every single day, first thing in the morning, I just talk to the agent and I say like, 'Hey, what work have I done recently where I should build new workflows and build new agents and build new stuff?' and it will start proposing them to me and says here's the next thing you should build. Here's the next thing you should build. Here's the next thing you should build. And as a result, I've started to build up more and more of these workflows that just run for me and more and more of my day is getting automated end to end. Which is pretty freaking awesome.

Yeah, I do a daily brief every morning. So, every morning at 6 a.m. it kicks off. It goes and checks my calendar. It checks my to-do list. It checks my email. And based on all that stuff, it says, 'Here's the important things you need to do for your day.' You've got a big focus block in the morning. Make sure you spend time doing this. This is the one thing you have to get done. If you do this thing, you win the day. Then, here's these three meetings that you have in the afternoon. And here's a prep specific for that meeting. So, you have each meeting a Google doc that gets generated that says what I need to know for that meeting, which is fantastic. So, that I do every single morning. Another simple one, a lot of times those meetings have pre-read docs, so they've got a big Google doc. Those I just fire into the system and say, I have an exec review skill and I run that against the Google doc and the SDK goes and fetches all the information. Sometimes it's multiple docs, fetches it, and then it reviews it for me and says, here's what you need to know going into the meeting. Here's the questions you need to ask. Here's the things you need to know about. Here's a fourth one. I review every single job offer that goes out inside of Zapier still. I used to go manually review dozens of scorecards for each applicant. I would go review their resume. I'd go look at their LinkedIn. I would make sure that we were running a really tough, rigorous review cycle. Now I just point it to the Ashby profile. So Ashby is our tool that we use to run interviews and keep track of applicants. So when an offer comes my way, I point it at that URL. The agent, the SDK goes and fetches the application and it fetches all the scorecards on the candidate and then it fires off an advisory council. The advisory council analyzes, it generates multiple personas. So like a ruthless CFO, a wartime COO operator, a contrarian board member, a recruiting expert, it creates all these sub-profiles and then each of those sub-agents goes and reviews the candidate and says, 'Yes, you should hire this person or no, you shouldn't hire this person. Is this person a bar raiser?' And it allows me to audit our own hiring process to say, 'Hey, are we actually doing a good job here or not?' And that was a task that used to take me 30 minutes per every candidate. And now it's down to like five. And that's the power of these tools is if you start to stack them, all of a sudden this 30 minute task here, this 30 minute task there, they all get shrunk down to five minute tasks, two-minute tasks, and then you find yourself with big new blocks of time during the day. And you start to go, well, what else should I work on? I can run this. Maybe I should launch a new podcast. Maybe I should spend more time on social. Maybe I have a new idea for this product. And so I find myself actually doing way more work than I ever did before because I have tools like this. But it's fun. The more work is not actually from a time sitting in front of keyboard thing. It's not actually that I'm spending that much more time in front of the keyboard. It's just my throughput, my velocity is just so much higher, and it's fun because I'm just not sitting around waiting for this stuff to get done. It just does the work for me. It's great.

100%.