How AI got me 3 promotions: the ultimate guide for EAs (w/ Zapier’s EA)

I think from EAs I hear like, "Oh, AI doesn't think the way I do." I'm like, "It can, though. It can," [chuckles] as long as you can figure out the system behind why you're doing things and be able to articulate that.

I think this is going to be one of the most practical, time-saving, and stress-saving episodes of How I AI we have ever had. This agent does everything you want and then more, and over time you can make it more intelligent. It's serving as this kind of second brain for me, where, yes, I have all this, and part of my superpower as an EA is remembering all of these things about people, but this is making sure that it's not all in my head, and I can really refresh my memory quickly on all the contexts, rather than diving through the CRM, my email, Slack, and looking at all these things separately. If you are doing a repeated task every week, spend time that week automating that task. I definitely am a believer that AI can only enable us in this role. I think it's a when, not an if. We will have to be folks that adopt these tools. [upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today we have Cortney Hickey, EA to the CEO at Zapier, and yes, of course, she uses AI to automate all of the admin tasks related to meetings, and document preps, and feedback, but she's also gonna show us some unique ways that you can use AI to reinforce your cultural values and operating principles. This is a really great one for anybody thinking about organization at scale, operations at scale, and culture at scale. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch: these tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs, and for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features, so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale upmarket faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at WorkOS.com. Start building today. Cortney, welcome to How I AI. I am really excited about this episode because I think this is going to be one of the most practical, time-saving, and stress-saving episodes of How I AI we have ever had. So I'm just pumped to have you on. Can you just tell us a little bit about why you've chosen to dive headfirst into using AI in your role, aside from the place that you work?