SaaStr 821: Swapping Stories - Building AI-First Companies: Insights from Zapier's CEO and Co-Founder Wade Foster
episode
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
37 min
2 speakers
6 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
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What is Zapier’s evolution from a simple integration tool to an AI‑first automation platform?
Welcome to the official Saster Podcast, where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets.
Up today on the Saster Podcast. I'll give you an example of one that just went live last week that I think is gonna turn out to be pretty powerful for us. So for our Zapier Team and enterprise customers. These folks are on. Contracts that come up for renewal. And when they come up for renewal, They can be like a fair amount of work to figure out, okay. What's the state of this account? Should the count be upsold? Is it gonna contract? If it's gonna contract, what's the right place to contract? If we're gonna upsell, what is in the use cases, there's like a fair amount of work that goes into that. And we have a lot of accounts that are Five K, ten K And so we want that to be like a faster velocity move versus actually deploying like a true sort of like enterprise AE on this.
And so what one of our Redbox team built out was a renewals agent. And so what this renewals agent does is It goes and collects. A bunch of information about the account. So it knows what is the usage trends in the account over the last year, what's trending up, what's trending down. It understands what those use cases are.
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Hey everybody at Saster. I'm Emilia LaRoute, the chief AI officer here. And together with my co-host Guillaume Kuban, we're launching a new podcast series in Saster called Swapping Notes, where in every episode we'll sit down with the top AI leaders in SaaS and B2B, and we'll swap notes on what's actually working and what's not moving the needle in AI. So whether you're a founder trying to navigate your AI strategy or go to market leader implementing AI features and frameworks yourselves, this is the show for you. So without further ado, let's swap some notes. Hello, Saster. Welcome back to the Saster AI podcast. Amelia and Geom G are back at it again here with Wade Foster. Many of you already know him.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Zapier. And we're so excited to have him. We've been using Zapier for a long time at Saster. A lot of you probably use it now to connect all of your tools. It recently had a $5 billion valuation, I think on just a little bit over a million total raised. We'll talk about that a bit. But one thing in particular we want to use as like a launching point. I know you've made some statements, Wade, recently, in the news of you want all your new hires to be AI fluent. Obviously, Zapier can power a lot of what AI is doing behind the scenes. You've also said you've got customers running 50 million AI tasks in 20 days. Just to kick it off with our audience, give us a little bit more into the current state of AI.
Zapier we like to call our
the most connected AI orchestration platform. It started. The Zapir that people are probably known familiar with was a simple integration tool. It's like trigger action. You get a lead from a a form on your website, add it to my CRM. Phase two of Zapier was then embracing full-on workflow automation.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Zapier’s evolution from a simple integration tool to an AI‑first automation platform?
0:01–4:42
2
How does Zapier’s “renewals agent” use AI to automate contract renewals and upsells?
4:42–9:28
3
What distinguishes deterministic workflows from agentic (AI‑driven) workflows at Zapier?
9:28–17:27
4
How are AI‑enhanced agentic workflows applied to sales, customer success, and internal ops?
17:27–24:09
5
What practices does Zapier use to build AI fluency into hiring and employee onboarding?
24:09–31:09
6
Which AI use‑cases (content creation, customer engagement, back‑office) generate the most impact for Zapier’s customers?
31:09–37:35
Speakers
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