“Our sales folks touch probably less than one percent of our total customers. And it's not meaningfully infringing on their job. It's just helping them like touch more accounts that otherwise we never could have touched.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
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More from Wade Foster
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Foster: AI Will Eventually Act Autonomously as Sales Reps and CSMs
“I think it takes a lot of work to get that last mile good enough where you would say, Hey, we're actually going to feel confident actually having the AI act as the sales rep or act as the CSM in these equations where it's going to get there. It's going to get …”
Wade FosterSep 17, 2025▶ 13:52Building AI-First Companies: Insights from Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster
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Foster: Social media posts about autonomous AI agents are mostly hype
“If you go read X, if you go read LinkedIn, you would think that everybody is deploying agents Everywhere. Here, look at this crazy agent I've done that has solved all these magical problems for me. Mostly that is hype.”
Wade FosterSep 17, 2025▶ 6:28Building AI-First Companies: Insights from Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster
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Foster: 'AI-first' executive mandates cause chaos without function-by-function fluency baselines
“You get the CEO memo, like we're an AI first company, right? Which you need to do that step is an important step. But I talked to a lot of people who that's the only step they do. And then it's just like chaos inside the organization being like, I don't know w…”
Wade FosterSep 17, 2025▶ 32:16Building AI-First Companies: Insights from Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster
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Best practices yield average outcomes; the most successful companies are outliers
“Best practices are going to get you the same outcomes as everyone else. The best companies are outliers, and they're outliers in one or two key dimensions.”
Wade FosterDec 23, 2021▶ 22:05The Secrets to Scaling Zapier to 500 Employees from Employees Themselves with Zapier CEO Wade Foster
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Foster: Scaled automation mixes deterministic and agentic AI workflows
“So what are the folks that are actually deploying like automation at scale doing? They're finding ways to mix and match deterministic workflows with agentic workflows and do those together.”
Wade FosterSep 17, 2025▶ 6:46Building AI-First Companies: Insights from Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster
Insight
Foster: Sales and support reps have no excuse for lacking account context
“There's no excuse for a sales rep or a CSM or a support rep to not have context about your account, to know what you're doing.”
Wade FosterSep 17, 2025▶ 11:44Building AI-First Companies: Insights from Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster
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