Wade Foster on AI
From Zapier’s Wade Foster on AI Automation, No-Code Tools & the Future of Work · · Matt Britton
“I think the real unlock that AI brought to tools like Zapier is the ability to work with unstructured data and unstructured text. You know, before to your point, everything had to be like very mechanical. And so, you know, there was use cases that that's great for. It's like when this happens, do this, do this. But the moment you had to do, you know, take this PDF or take this big blob of text and do something interesting with it, it was like uh I mean, we'll try for you, but you're probably not going to have a very good time with this type of use case.”
On , Wade Foster, CEO & Co-Founder at Zapier, spoke about AI during Zapier’s Wade Foster on AI Automation, No-Code Tools & the Future of Work on Matt Britton.
About Wade Foster
Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, has been discussing the company's internal adoption of AI and its implications for the future of work. Foster stated that after the launch of GPT-4, Zapier called a "code red" internally, leading to a company-wide AI hackathon that raised daily AI usage from under 10% to over 50% in a single week, and later to 97%. He described the creation of an "AI fluency rubric" used for hiring and performance reviews, and said the company's headcount is around 800 people, all remote. Foster has also commented on the distinction between deterministic workflows and AI agents, which he described as software that can be given a goal and its own reasoning to complete tasks. He has said that "the most important shift that is happening right now is software will predominantly be built and used by an agent and not a human." Foster has also reflected on Zapier's early history, noting that the company was bootstrapped and raised only $1.3 million in venture capital before reaching a $5 billion valuation. He described a "don't hire until it hurts" philosophy and an early SEO distribution strategy borrowed from a creator of bingo card websites. Regarding the broader AI landscape, Foster said that while AI may be overhyped in the short term, he believes it is "being underhyped" over the next decade. He has also argued that the declining cost of producing software will lead to more niche products being built, and that AI systems with access to all of a company's tools can know the business "better than any individual in my company."