The Exchanges

Q Okay. I see all the different things that I can do with this. The, your CRM is my favorite so far. What I'm wondering is how did you find these things that you're doing on a repeated basis to turn into automations? How is it identifying what those are?

A So here was what hooked me. I made a concentrated effort to say, I am going to do all of my work inside of cursor. And just said, this is where I'm going to do all my work. And even at first when it was maybe a little slower because I wasn't quite used to the workflow yet, I still forced myself to do it that way. Then every week I would just ask it, Hey, look over everything we did together this week and give me ideas for new tools, new automations that we should go build that would make my work much more like faster, higher quality, better, et cetera. And it would propose three or four or five things. And of the, you know, five things it would propose, I'd be like, great, let's go build three. And we would just, we just do that process over and over and over again. And it just starts to compound. And plus, once you start, once you start automating a few things, you find that your own brain starts to get, um, better at spotting opportunities because you're like, oh, I remember this other thing I did that was kind of like this. I can probably do this in the same way or the same version of it. Uh, and so it's like a habit. Like, the more you do it, the better you get over time.

AI assessment note: “every week I would just ask it, Hey, look over everything we did together”

Q Give me a few more use cases. This is number one for me because this is real relationships with real customers. You keep connecting with them. It's going to build your, your relationship, build your revenue and also help you understand what they want so you can create better products for them. How about a basic one like a daily briefs?

A Yeah, I do a daily brief every morning. So every morning at six AM, 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. Uh, you know, here's the, you know, you've got a big focus block in the morning. 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, you know, here's, uh, these three meetings that you have in the afternoon. And, uh, here's a prep specific for that meeting. So you have each meeting, uh, a, a Google doc that gets generated that says, um, What I need to know for that meeting, which is fantastic. So that I do every single morning. Um, 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, uh, 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. It fetches it, and then it reviews it for me and says, here's, 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. Um, I used to go manually review Y…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I do a daily brief every morning. So every morning at six AM”

Q Okay. All right, and so now it is connected to your Slack, and while it's doing this, and it's doing all this research, what's the difference between this and MCP that you did before that also connected, um, all the tools?

A So MCP is a powerful tool, and soon MCP will actually be the SDK under the, the, uh, under the hood. But what the SDK can do, especially when you're using an agent harness, is it can Uh, 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, uh, 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. Um, and here you can see it's, it's come back. And shared a sanitized view of the last 10 things that have sort of popped up in Slack for me. Teammates said they need to miss a recorded meeting because they have a conflict, a 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, you know, 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 a CRM everybody on the team uses. Um, 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 w…

AI assessment note: “whereas the MCP has all the Zapier trigger and action library predefined out of the box”

Q How do you get them to feel this level of it's not me, but I'm going to try it. And ideally the level that where you are, where you want to go say to Chelsea, you got to find out, you got to see what I'm doing. How do you get them to that?

A So, you know, at Zapier, we have this value. Don't be a robot, build the robot. So like, I think we have a culture where the employee base is probably more leaned in on this stuff than probably most, even still, we try and have a like very vibrant culture of show and tell. And so we had a big summit last, ah, a couple weeks ago where everyone came to LA. At the summit, we did all sorts of workshops. And so at the workshops, people were showing off, here's my AI chief of staff, like, and you know, those, those workshops were like standing room only because people are like, how do I, I want to learn how to do this stuff. We had hackathons where people are sitting around learning from each other, training notes on this. Um, you know, this week now we are rolling out company-wide. We're getting everybody Uh, in every function, not just engineering. So like marketing, sales, accounting, HR, all set up on either cursor, cloud code, or codex. One of the three. It's like, you need to be using a tool like this as a daily driver of your work because the power of these tools is just so, um, it's so incredible. And especially when you hook them up to something like Zapier MCP and give it access to your tools and your data, the types of things you can do. It's just like jaw dropping.

AI assessment note: “we try and have a like very vibrant culture of show and tell.”

Q I want to be on, I want to be on my phone. Ok, what, one other thing that I'm wondering about with your setup is, Do you use MCP like Zapier's MCP to be able to, for example, draft an email? So once you come to a conclusion, you will. How do you invoke, uh, that? How do you say use a Zapier MCP and draft an email for me?

A So you, um, you just can turn on like a bunch of, um, uh, you can create your Zapier MCP server and then you add tools to it. So you could add like Slack, Gmail, calendar, you name it. And then you don't usually, you don't have to like, again, you don't have to Do any fancy stuff. You can just say, draft me an email, please. Add, add this to my calendar event. Now, if you do say, use Zapier MCP to draft a email inside of Gmail for you, you will find that it, like, definitely gets it right. Sometimes if you don't, like, if you're not that, like, verbose with it, it will forget that it has access to use those tools, and you'll have to remind it and say, like, hey, remember, you have access to these tools.

AI assessment note: “You can just say, draft me an email, please.”

Q all the, all the likes and the hearts and the attention. We're clearly not there. And if anything, it's actually sending people over to Zapier, but it's, it's a nice way to introduce this new tool and tell your followers about it. Now let's see the, the comparable experience. Like if you and I were going to build this type of, uh, brief in Zapier, what would that look like?

A So here we've got, uh, the Zapier agent builder. Okay. Now this is a little different. So instead of, you know, having the like nodes and drag and drop, which you can do with Zapier's workflow builder with the Zapier agent, you're just describing what do you want the agent to do in plain language? And the nice thing is, um, I know a lot of folks struggle with thinking through like all the detailed instructions that agents really benefit from. One of the things you can do with the agent is just describe it Like, you would be talking to a, a, a friend. And you wouldn't give a friend, like, all the nitty gritty details. And so you might just say, uh, make me a meeting brief agent that, you know, gives me some details before my meetings. So this is a pretty bad prompt. Like, this is not what agents generally prefer to get. They like detailed instructions. This is not detailed instructions at all, but we're gonna start with anyway and see what happens.

AI assessment note: “So here we've got, uh, the Zapier agent builder.”

Q Do you have any personal ones that you do for yourself?

A I'll tell you, so the, the one I think is, I get a lot of value out of is, We use, um, meeting recorders for a lot of our meetings internally. And so, um, I have found that AI is an, is an exceptionally good coach. It is infinitely patient. It is neutral. It just observes what it sees and it tells you what it, it thinks it has observed. And so for our exec team meetings, we, we have these recorded. And so we'll take the transcript automatically. We'll send it to a prompt. That is based on the five dysfunctions of a team. So if you haven't read five dysfunctions of a team, it's, it basically describes like good behaviors and bad behaviors of teams. And then based on this prompt, it will generate coaching for all the meeting participants. And so they'll all get a DM that says, here's how the meeting went for you. And it is so valuable because again, it has that just very unbiased, very neutral observer. You know, it doesn't care about, oh, Wade's the boss. And so I need to butter him up a little bit, or, you know, This, I don't really like this person, so I really want to, like, you know, grind their, grind their gears a little bit more than the X person, or like, this person I like a lot, so I'm just gonna be, you know, I'm just gonna take it easy. It doesn't, it doesn't think, it doesn't care about any of that. It's just, it's just like, I saw that here you interrupted this per…

AI assessment note: “the one I think is, I get a lot of value out of is”

Q I've seen whole agencies built on nothing but zaps. They take on a client, they create a zap, and the zap now is getting smarter and smarter. In fact, to call it a single zap is just oversimplifying it. Like what are the smart things that it's doing now because of AI that weren't possible maybe a year ago?

A The biggest new capabilities you get with AI are two things. One, you can add AI into workflows, and what that gives you is the ability to work with unstructured data. Now, unstructured data allows you to do some very specific stuff. One, you know, in the old school world, you might have an email template that was using a mail merge. Well, mail merges are, like, sort of personalized, but not really personalized. I sort of pretend like I know you. But with AI, you can actually go do deep research on somebody, so I can say, hey, tell me about Andrew and Mixergy and everything he's trying to do, and then based on everything you go learn, now I want you to go write a specific email to Andrew using these key points and translated it to him in a way that he cares about. So instead of using those, like, old-school vanilla mail merge, I'm able to actually generate a very custom email that is very specific to everything I know about you. That's something you couldn't have done before. So that's a great example of it. Another great example is You might have, um, a business where you get a lot of customer feedback. Like maybe you've got a bunch of support tickets coming in, or maybe you've got a customer feedback form. Well, in the past, you might want to go look through all that feedback and try and understand, you know, what are the common complaints I have? How do I go generate an FAQ?…

AI assessment note: “The biggest new capabilities you get with AI are two things.”

Q And by the way, demo mode is what?

A 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 my real work in it. Personal information. Uh, so I made this like skill that is, I call it demo mode. And basically it allows me to run real requests, real things that I might actually do in the world, but demo mode, um, Basically like rewrites it so that they're like redacted or like changes the names of things. So it doesn't actually show off stuff that, uh, might actually, you know, leak zap your confidential information.

AI assessment note: “Basically like rewrites it so that they're like redacted or like changes the names”

Q Like what? So now I'm understanding what you're doing. I wouldn't have thought of it two years ago, but go ahead.

A I'll give you an example. So that, um, analysis I did, I had the war council help me out with on, uh, analyzing our sales data. What that was, was I had four different spreadsheets. Those each spreadsheet had like 10 or 12 tabs in it. They all had like hundreds of rows of data in it. And so I don't know about you, but, like, I don't consider, like, a spreadsheet my natural habitat, and so I'm looking at all this stuff, and I can, like, I can start to, like, poke out some interesting things going on in there, but I'm like, it's hard for me to spot it all, and so I just fed all four of those spreadsheets into my AI system, and I said, help me review, first I said, just, like, help me review this stuff. Like, walk me through what's in In these, these spreadsheets, because I don't, I'm not exactly sure how to go through them. And so, as it's going through, it's like pointing out different things to me. I always like to start here, too, because I don't want to assume, I don't want to try and one-shot the dang thing. Like, I like to, I like to check its work, and if I say, like, hey, help me review it, like, step by step, I can sort of get a feel for the files in the same way that it has a feel for the finals. But then eventually, when I get to the end, I'll just say, like, Analyze all the themes that you see in here that you think are important for me as the CEO to know. And then it…

AI assessment note: “I'll give you an example. So that, um, analysis I did”

Q I imagine digital marketing in general for online only businesses is an easy one, right?

A Digital marketing agencies, they're like, this is the place where I've seen most automation agencies spin up because there is so much just low hanging fruit that can help any business be more, more successful. Mostly these lead management flows that we're showing off, like these are exceptionally impactful and they generate money, like speed to lead. You, it improves your conversion rate massively. And when you improve your conversion rates, it means you can now be more efficient in how you deploy your advertising dollars, because now you're getting a higher, uh, customer lifetime value, higher ACVs. So now you can afford to pay more for those leads than you were in the past. When you're able to pay more for those leads, you're boxing out competitors. And so these types of automations, it not just about being faster or more efficient and like saving you time. It is Actually like real money hitting your, uh, your bottom line when you do this stuff really well. And so you, like a lot of these folks understand this, uh, the, the marketing agencies deploying these, these workflows.

AI assessment note: “this is the place where I've seen most automation agencies spin up”

Q You know what, what, I guess what I want to know before we start diving into what this is, is who cares? Like essentially what we're looking at is some, it's, it's looking at a type form entry and then it's qualifying whether the person is a good customer or not. Why is this so important that this is what you're showing me?

A So every business Has to acquire customers. Like this is just one of the core competencies of every business from day one is you have to figure out how to get customers. And if you're any good at marketing at all, you're going to acquire a bunch of leads and not everybody that sort of comes into your funnel is going to be an actually good fit for the products you sell. So what this agent here does is it pretends that we are a fictional Uh, automation agency that specializes in selling automation consulting services to mid-sized regional insurance providers. That's who we're really good at. Like maybe you're from the insurance world and you just know exactly like the processes inside and out, you know, the tech stacks, you know, everything. And so you are really good at this kind of business. And so you have, you know, you're, you're putting advertising out in the world. You're telling all the regional insurance providers like, Hey, I can help you do this stuff. But, you know, occasionally you've got like a mom and pop person coming in. Maybe you've got like a mega, you know, mega company that comes in. Maybe you've got someone that's not insurance. Maybe they're real estate, or maybe they're, you know, some other financial services. It's like close, but not exactly what you do. And they're just reaching out because they're like, well, you know, insurance, but maybe, you know, m…

AI assessment note: “not everybody that sort of comes into your funnel is going to be an actually good fit”

Q okay, go ahead. If that's what you can do, I did it. Um, and then a few days later, I was at a cloud flare event and they talked about how they can do the same thing, but better. And I said, wait, I would have preferred all those features, but I had no idea you even existed. So what are you finding that is effective for marketing to agents?

A Well, so agents care a ton about, like, clean documentation, like, fast webpages, so, you know, it's like, the thing I'm seeing a lot of folks do is serve up a separate version of their webpage that is meant just for the agent, and so that content is, like, plain text. It's served up, like, really fast. It's, like, written, like, very, um, it's, like, very descriptive, uh, Uh, almost, like, mechanical, because, like, that's what the agent prefers. It's like, I want to have just, like, give me just the facts in, like, an easy-to-consume way. Um, very clear, um, very direct, and as a result, like, it, you know, it, it's able to, like, understand what you're offering much better. Um, whereas, like, you know, a human cares a ton about the design, like, the visual design and things like that. Agent? It's not so much, right? So, it's a different, You just kind of have to, like, figure out, like, what is the thing that it's actually optimizing? And I'll be honest, like, a lot of this is, you know, very much like a more art than science right now. Yes, people are building evals and, you know, things like that to kind of track it, but, um, yeah, when you ask, like, people who are really good at this, their answers are, like, very hand-wavy still.

AI assessment note: “serve up a separate version of their webpage that is meant just for the agent”

Q What's another decision that you took to it?

A Uh, let's see. I've, I've got, um, what was a recent one that I was working with it on? Uh, I had, um, oh, I was, I was reviewing a bunch of, um, sales data. And, uh, I was trying to, um, figure out, like, like, some of the stuff was good, some of the stuff we were doing wasn't so good, and I was, like, trying to figure out what kind of feedback I needed to give, and so I first, like, went back and forth with it without invoking the skill, just, like, pulling in a bunch of contacts, loading in a bunch of data, and then finally I was like, okay, I want the War Council to advise on this. Like, what is, like, where are we winning, and where are we losing on this? Like, what do, what do you see, and, like, what kind of feedback do you, you know, needs to be given? And so it like quickly summarized. It was like, here's the three things that are like most important. You're killing the first two. The third is like a bloodbath. You need to fix it. And so you're like, oh, okay. Like that. It like, it put language to a thing I was maybe feeling, but couldn't quite articulate yet.

AI assessment note: “I was reviewing a bunch of, um, sales data.”

Q So is this like an internal tool that they built using, uh, using Opus?

A Well, so I'll tell you how I built it, um, by, uh, the, the guy that's run social for us, we catch up, uh, 15 minutes every other week, and he's always, like, building crazy stuff, and so I'm always asking him, like, tell me what new thing you built, and he's like, wait, I gotta tell you about my war council, and so, you know, he, he explains what it is to me, and I was like, that's incredible, and so here's how I built it. I got off the call, and I have cursor hooked up to granola, And so the, the meeting was recorded with Granola, and so I said, hey, Granola, our, our, go, go fetch that meeting I just had with Ryan, and in it he describes the war council he built. Build that for me. And it just went and did it.

AI assessment note: “I have cursor hooked up to granola... Build that for me. And it just went and did it.”

Q What's an example of a question that you took to your war council skill and what's the outcome that you couldn't have gotten to without and that was valuable?

A Well, I love using them for hiring decisions, um, because it is very critical, and so, um, you know, I find that humans, when you go through hiring processes, have all sorts of, like, biases built into them. Um, like, one, it, you, you find this, it, it's hard for humans to say no to, like, candidates that are good. It gets harder to say no as the interview goes along. So, like, two people before you said yes, now are you gonna be the person that says no? So you get more of that. And also humans I find are not often as like critical. And so, you know, they'll ask like a surface level question and then kind of move on to the next thing. And they don't necessarily dig as much to be like, is this person really, really good? And so as a result, when you score against the rubric, I find that human graders on average tend to be a little softer. Now that's not generally, that's not universally true. I've seen like human evaluators be like very, very strict too, but Yeah, I think, ah, the, the War Council is, Like, it, it, it plays its role, and it tells you exactly what it sees. It's not influenced by, you know, these other things. It just, it just calls it like it sees it. And as a result, I find it to be a really helpful tool at keeping the panel honest, keeping me honest on a decision where I can find myself sort of like feeling one way or the other, and then you, you talk to it, a…

AI assessment note: “I love using them for hiring decisions, um, because it is very critical”