Zapier 创始人演示 AI 应用：从聊天到自动化代理

Wait, wait. Sam, you got to click bait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change his life.

Well, are you a five? What are you guys worth now?

Who knows?

You know, you know, you you

All right, we should do a little intro. So, first, do you Is it I've been saying Zapier my whole life. Is it Zapier or Zapier? Zapier makes you happier is the trick.

It reminds me happier. Wow, dude. How is that not your slogan?

Here's your here's what your slogan is on your site. The automation layer for Agentic AI. It doesn't really flow the same way as Zapier makes you happier.

It doesn't. We could So there's two things from the name. We one we just couldn't afford the second P when we started the domain was available. But the other like we were too clever for our own good is it has API in the name which we always thought like oh that's neat cuz it's all connecting all the these APIs and all that good stuff.

I didn't even notice that.

Didn't notice that.

Yeah.

Honestly didn't even notice was missing.

But also if you played Zapier makes you happier I would have read it as Savior makes you happier.

Just gone on with your day.

But we're happy you're here.

Thank you. The short story is you're this guy who's built this really cool started off as a very simple idea where you can make different apps connect with each other. What does that really mean? Let's say I have a business and people submit a form over here on my form thing, but then I kind of need that form thing. I need all the people who submitted the form. I need that data to go over here in this other unrelated app.

And you guys built those like universal plugs and you could just plug in anything to anything else. And it was just incredibly useful. Sam used it. I used it. We didn't realize or I didn't realize how monstrous of a business this had become. I believe you guys are worth several billions maybe five billion was a number that I had seen at some point in time and I think you had bootstrapped a very long way. I don't is it purely bootstrap or you at some point took some money?

I think the word people call it now is seedstrap. So we did go through YC and we raised about a million and change but that's all the primary capital we've ever taken.

Yeah. So just incredibly to to raise a million bucks and then get to 5 billion in value is just pretty pretty wild. So super cool. But you're here not to necessarily tell the whole story of how Zapier makes you happier. But to show us what you're doing with AI. Can you give me a public sales pitch real quick? I'm requesting a sales pitch. And what I want is I know how OG V1 of Zapier worked where you connect one app to another.

You're saying, "Hey, we have this new AI product that you use with Claude presumably makes your Claude or Chat GBT usage more powerful, whatever."

I haven't been using that. I also, here's the other caveat, am kind of dumb. So, like, imagine talking to somebody with half the IQ of yours.

He's like, "Can you give me a pitch to someone who's sort of dumb and doesn't listen,

but they are smart at the same time. The confidence of a smart man."

Yeah.

I have really good news for you, though. Like I think AI is this incredible gift to people who are kind of dumb because you can just talk to it and say like hey I didn't understand that answer explain it to me like I'm five and so you can keep like going down the dumbness stack I guess for like lack of a better word until you understand it and then go okay now like teach me back up to where I need to go. So, okay, the sales pitch, you want the sales pitch.

In the old world, you know, Zapier, you know, come in, build integrations, connect apps. The new world has a lot of the same things, but it's different. Nowadays, you're hanging in clawed, you're hanging in, you know, codeex or cursor or, you know, open claw or whatever it is that you like using, right? And you're just talking to it going back and forth. Most people start with that. AI as a chatbot is valuable, but it's only generally smart.

It knows everything that the internet knows. it doesn't know anything about your business. So the next step that you need to go to is to start connecting your tools. You start connecting your CRM, your help desk, your email, your team chat, all this stuff and you feed that context in to the AI. Now when you start asking it questions about my first million and all this other stuff, you get not just generally smart answers, you get hyperspecific answers around how your business works.

Okay. So if you install Zap year into this you can hook up any of the tools that we have right so that's that's the first thing the first bit of value and the first thing that people sort of experience is like oh connecting stuff makes sense but look you can do native connectors and all that other stuff so you know use Zapier use the native connectors do whatever you want the next layer and where this gets really powerful is not where you're sitting having this like back and forth conversation it's when you're actually deploying automations and agents to actually go operate for you while you sleep like that's where you start to get the real magic and the reason you want to use Zapier to do that versus like any of these generic agent builders.

What was what's an example?

I mean like you know Claude has routines or chat GPT has scheduled stuff like you know there's a bunch of these things that can kind of do agents or pseudo agents these days. But the nice thing about Zapier is that if you use us we are going to make it so that whatever you build is optimized to run more deterministically than agentically. And I don't think people have caught up on this yet, but you've probably experienced it.

Climbing up the IQ scale.

I know. I know. Hang tight. Hang tight. Hang tight. 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 to to use AI. Got it.

And you've got this um you can host it on zapier.com. So you don't have to sit here and like keep your laptop open to run these agents in the background. And so you just get this like rock solid infrastructure that Zapier has always been great at and hookup of everything that we've always done. But you can build, you know, inside Claude,

which is like really nice because Claude just kind of the the natural language style of building is I don't know. It's just like way better than the no code style stuff that we were doing in the past.

Well, you're not the Wolf of Wall Street, but that was a pretty good sales pitch. I gave you the sell me this pen test and you did a pretty good job there, so I appreciate that. I feel like I now actually understand it. So that that was good.

Well, and here's the magic. You can take, if you didn't, and you're just pretending and being nice, you can take the transcript of this and you can plug it into Claude and say, "Wade said this weird thing. I can't tell what this guy was talking about.

Tell me what he was really saying."

And that's like the cool part of AI.

That is cool.

You gave us a list of stuff. So we said, "Wait, what are you what are you making?" And it doesn't always have to be like this like crazy like gamechanging stuff, but what are you making with AI? And you gave us a list of like three or four things. You said you have robots.

You got to click bait it up.

How a five billion dollar founder