Foster: Pure AI agents guess and waste tokens; deterministic workflows are more reliable
Wade Foster · How a $5B founder is using AI (3 tutorials) · Aug 26, 2026 · at 5:35
Zapier CEO Wade Foster argues why deterministic workflow logic is superior to fully autonomous AI agents for business reliability and cost.
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“Agents, agents, they kind of just guess what to do, right? And if they're smart enough, they guess right most of the time, but sometimes the agents guess wrong. And the second thing is agents are using tokens, right? We probably heard token maxing, right? And so they're really expensive, but if you use Zapier, we're going to write code for you and we're going to write workflow logic for you. Which means that it's going to run like a machine runs. And so you're going to get, it's not going to burn tokens. It's going to be reliable and accurate, and it's only going to use AI exactly where it needs to use AI.”
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