Zapier's CEO shares his personal AI stack | Wade Foster

So many CEOs sending these memos: "We want you to do ten times more work using these magical tools. You go figure it out."

I see a lot of CEOs fall to the delegation trap. They write the AI memo. They say, "Hey, we're gonna go do this," and then they don't do anything else. They ask their exec team, who asks a director on their team, who asks a manager on their team, who asks an IC on the team, and then that poor IC is like, "Am I figuring this out for the whole company?" It's like, do you think that's gonna go well for that person or for your org? And it's like, no, not really. And so I think it's really important for leaders to do hackathons, to do show and tells, whatever you wanna call them, whatever you wanna do, but you do need to provide a little bit of play space for the organization to get comfortable with it. And then once people put their hands on the tools, I find that some of the fear goes away.

You've actually put these rubrics together that allow you to identify how do you build AI fluency as a PM at these different levels, and I think that exercise is so effective because people change [chuckles] around what gets rewarded and what gets measured.

There is so many tasks that are not economically valuable right now, and these are the areas where AI and agents really thrive. [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 a very special episode with Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier. Wade's gonna show us how CEOs can do more than send emails to their teams about how they should adopt AI. Instead, he's gonna pop open his screen and show us how he uses meeting notes, Zapier, and, believe it or not, Grok, to find, hire, and inspire talent across the company. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Brex. If you're listening to this show, you already know AI is changing how we work in real, practical ways. Brex is bringing that same power to finance. Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for founders. With autonomous agents running in the background, your finance stack basically runs itself. Cards are issued, expenses are filed, and fraud is stopped in real time without you having to think about it. Add Brex's banking solution with a high-yield treasury account, and you've got a system that helps you spend smarter, move faster, and scale with confidence. One in three startups in the US already runs on Brex. You can, too, at brex.com/howiai. Wade, thanks for joining How I AI. Why I am so excited to have you here is I think Zapier has done one of the most exceptional jobs, not just leaning into adding AI into their product, but really thinking about how AI transforms a company and how people do work there. And today, we have a really exciting show, where we're gonna show how you think about AI talent, AI fluency, interviewing for AI, and even finding some, um, AI-pilled talent out there that you can pull into the org. So before we get into it, why have you leaned in so hard into changing how your team works, who you hire, and what you reward inside the company?