2008
Wade Foster says the financial crisis at the end of his university years was his wake-up call that he had to make his own path.
“what really kind of was the wake-up call for me was the tail end of university when the uh, financial crisis hit.”
Topic
Wade Foster
37 facts from 3 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2011
Wade Foster's earlier job was at a local software company selling a natural language processing product that automatically graded student papers.
“it was a professor trying to, like, automatically grade student papers, which now seems quaint.”
2011
Wade Foster says he quit his day job in January, about a month after the first customer's reaction in early December.
“It was like early December that this happened, and, uh, by January, I'd quit the day job”
2023
After Zapier's AI hackathon week, daily AI use at the company rose from about 10% of employees to over 50%, according to Wade Foster.
“And at the end of that week, we went from about 10% of people using AI as part of their daily job to over 50%.”
2026
Zapier CEO Wade Foster says he mostly uses the Cursor AI coding tool as his daily driver.
“Yeah, so I mostly use cursor every single day.”
2026
Wade Foster says the newest top model scores about 40% on Zapier's AutomationBench, the highest result on that benchmark.
“It performs about 40% of the tasks accurately, which is the highest that there is.”
2026
Wade Foster says Zapier's AutomationBench contains roughly 600 tasks resembling normal knowledge-work workflows across disciplines such as marketing, sales, HR and operations.
“So we have probably 600 tasks that are of that variety that describe like a normal knowledge work workflowy task”
2026
Wade Foster says about 80% of what Zapier customers use AI agents for would be better done with deterministic code.
“the vast majority of what people are using an agent for 80% in fact, they probably should be using actually old-fashioned deterministic code.”
2026
Wade Foster says building workflows with no-code boxes feels antiquated and that AI now does the building, summing it up as 'no code is code'.
“the idea of building a no code, it feels antiquated to me. It's like the new code no code is code.”
2026
Zapier's automated support email program runs five independent AI agents to evaluate each troubleshooting case, according to Wade Foster.
“it spins up five agents, independent agents that evaluate the troubleshooting situation.”
2026
Wade Foster says he began a weekly AI review of his activity at the start of the year, and it has produced new tools that automate parts of his job.
“I started doing this workflow at the beginning of the year, and pretty much every week now, I have new tools, new systems that start to automate bits and pieces of my job.”
2026
Wade Foster says it is very likely Zapier will offer its weekly activity-review automation to customers as a product.
“Yes, I think it's very likely that'll come in some form factor.”
2026
Wade Foster believes per-seat software pricing is largely dying in favor of usage-based or outcome-based pricing.
“for the most part, seat based pricing is dead, we're dying.”
2026
Wade Foster notes that many customer support AI tools use outcome-based pricing by billing for resolved tickets.
“you see a lot of the like customer support tools doing this. Where we're going to say, hey, and we're going to you're going to we're going to bill you for resolved tickets.”
2026
Wade Foster put Zapier's then chief people officer, Brandon, in charge of AI transformation because his team was already strong at job redesign, compensation and reskilling.
“it turned out Brandon, our chief people officer at the time, was, like, really good at doing a lot of these things.”
2026
Host Nathan said Wade Foster had tweeted that some Zapier engineers were spending about $30,000 a month on AI tokens.
“I saw you tweet not too long ago that you have some engineers spending $30,000 a month on tokens at Zapier”
2026
Wade Foster describes Zapier as an organization of almost 800 people.
“when you have a almost 800 person organization, you're there's just a big education effort.”
2026
Wade Foster expects companies, including Zapier, to eventually assign AI token budgets to individual employees.
“I do suspect that token budgets are gonna be a real thing, though.”
2026
Wade Foster says that because employees now do their own basic data analysis with AI, Zapier needs fewer data analysts, who work on higher-value problems.
“Similarly, data analysts, everyone inside of Zapier is kind of their own mini data analyst now, and so you don't need, quote unquote, as many data analysts.”
Undated
Wade Foster grew up in Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri.
“I grew up in central Missouri, Jefferson City, it's the capital of the the the state.”
Undated
Wade Foster argues the leading AI labs keep leapfrogging each other with models that are good at different tasks, so companies shouldn't commit to one AI stack.
“Like they're constantly leapfrogging each other, their models are good at different tasks, different capabilities.”
Undated
Wade Foster says Zapier employees now use meeting prep agents for nearly everything, a task that was previously not done well.
“we've all got meeting prep agents for pretty much everything we do when nobody was really doing that before.”
Undated
Wade Foster suggests companies may give employees token budgets that cap how much they can spend on AI.
“Maybe employees get token budgets where it's like you're only limited as uh allowed to spend a certain amount.”
Undated
Wade Foster says Zapier doesn't have many outside investors, so it faces less investor scrutiny than a public company.
“we we're fortunate enough that we don't have like a ton of outside investors. And so we don't have the same scrutiny”
Undated
Wade Foster says the automation market is far larger than he imagined when he started Zapier about fifteen years ago.
“The market for automation was like orders of magnitude bigger than I ever thought it was when we started the company fifteen years ago.”
Undated
Wade Foster says Zapier has held customers' service credentials for fifteen years and treats protecting them as a core responsibility.
“we've held these credentials for fifteen years, right? So this has always been like a an important thing inside of Zapier”
Undated
Zapier CEO Wade Foster says he points an AI agent at the company's Slack, email, meeting notes, project management, CRM tools and code base to get summaries of company activity.
“I can point an agent at all the data sources inside of a company, whether it's, you know, our Slack instance, email, meeting notes, project management, CRM tools, code base, et cetera.”
Undated
Wade Foster says meeting recorder tools can mix up who said what, so AI summaries are often only directionally correct.
“One of the challenges with a lot of the meeting recorder tools is speaker attribution. It can mix up things like that.”
Undated
Wade Foster cites Zapier co-founder Brian's line that leaders can delegate work to AI but not accountability for its quality.
“my co-founder Brian has this line, you can delegate the work, but you can't delegate the accountability.”
Undated
Wade Foster lists as a Zapier communication rule that the author of a document should put more effort into it than the reader.
“I think one, the author should put more effort in than the reader.”
Undated
Foster says Zapier's customer support bots are measured at every step with metrics such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) and internal evaluations.
“those bots are measured very specifically. And, like, we have metrics every step of the way that are man measuring, you know, CSAT”
Undated
Wade Foster says his custom AI writing skills, trained on his writing, only get 80 to 90 percent of the way to sounding like him.
“Even still, I'd say it only gets, like, eighty, 90% of the way there.”
Undated
Wade Foster says some newer AI models are less good at communication tasks than earlier ones, and his co-founder says they sound 'fried'.
“some of the, like, newer models, I find to be even, like, less good at communication tasks.”
Undated
Wade Foster says he now uses voice-to-text heavily and that reading his own transcripts made him think more before speaking.
“I am a huge voice-to-text fan now because of AI.”
Undated
Wade Foster says AI models are heavily goal-seeking because of how they are reinforced, which makes them tend to tell users what they want to hear.
“these models are all goal seeking, um, like, heavily goal seeking. That's how they get reinforced.”
Undated
Wade Foster says he changed the system prompts on the AI models he uses so they debate and critique him and challenge his assumptions.
“changed the system prompts on all the models and things that I use to say”
Undated
Wade Foster recommends connecting a large language model to an organization's own communication systems and data, saying results are much worse without that context.
“if you are not hooking up your LLM to the actual data that you have inside your organization, you are getting a much worse experience.”
Episodes