How Zapier's EA built an army of AI interns to automate meeting prep and scale internal alignment

I think from EAS I hear like, "Oh, AI doesn't think the way I do." I'm like, "It can though. It can 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

articulate that." I think this is going to be one of the most practical, time-saving, and stressaving 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

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 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 context 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.

Welcome back to how I AI. I'm Claraveo,

product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today [music] we have Courtney Hickey, EA to the CEO at Zapier. And yes, of course, she uses AI

Zapier. And yes, of course, she uses AI to automate all of the admin tasks related to meetings and document [music] preps and feedback, but she's also going

to 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

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Start building today. Courtney, 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 stressaving 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 head first into using AI in your role aside from the place that you work?

Yeah. So I work for Zapier, which is an automation and AI orchestration company.

So of course it's part of our company ethos, but I am just personally super passionate about using AI because I

think it can help work myself out of the boring, repetitive, manual parts of my role so I can do more interesting work.

And so I truly believe that it's not a if you have to use AI in this type of role, it's a when. So, I like to be ahead of the curve. I like to learn by

doing. And so, I've spent as much time

doing. And so, I've spent as much time as I can over the past couple of years really diving into this and seeing how I can change the shape of my role with this new tech. And what I like is we're

going to start off on a workflow and use case that I think everyone can relate to, which is meetings stink. Or not

meetings stink, but meetings could be better used in most organizations.

They're expensive. You have a lot of people in them. And I think like prep and followup are so valuable and aren't really done well by organizations. So

I'd love for you to walk us through a couple of your meeting related workflows. Totally. Yeah. I mean, as an

workflows. Totally. Yeah. I mean, as an EA, the my life runs off of the calendar. So that was naturally one of

calendar. So that was naturally one of the first place I dove into with AI. And

so let's jump into one of my favorite workloads that I've built. And this is within Zapier agents. So our agents product uh within Zapier we have a bunch

of different products all the way from super deterministic automations that run the same way every time with little creativity to these agents that can do

tasks that involve more reasoning and uh have a lot more freedom to operate. So

you could build this in a zap, but I wanted to like paint the, you know, change the color of the sky with this agent for myself. So this is an example of one I use personally, but you can

replicate this for anyone you work with.

But this is essentially my weekly meeting prep agent which on Fridays I used to have maybe let's say 2 hours blocked 30 minutes to like do a retro on

that week and anything I need to change but then like spending an hour or so really diving into the next week and what I need to be prepared for. So the

way this agent works and it's kind of developed over time but it it has a few steps it goes through and the key thing is this is scheduled to trigger every week. I have it do it at Friday at 8

week. I have it do it at Friday at 8 a.m. So, you can have it whenever. And

a.m. So, you can have it whenever. And

basically, it goes through my calendar for the upcoming week. It identifies all meetings that require prep. So,

personally, I don't need to prep much for team one-on- ones or team standups or recurring internal meetings, but I do have more and more external meetings on my calendar now that I'm doing more out in the world with with AI and automation

and teaching folks how to do the same.

So, basically, I have it be a bit of a research buddy at first. So, first it just pulls by calendar. Then it goes and does all the research for me. So, this

uh takes anyone without a Zap year email and does a a web search basically. It

researches their current role, their industry experience, anything um anything noteworthy that I might want to know about them. And then it does this cool thing which also goes and checks in

our CRM, which we use HubSpot at Zapier, but you can you can put in any uh you know, of our 8,000 integrations here and and use your CRM. But for each external participant, it goes and then looks at

what their relationship is with Zapier.

So it looks at email address first, then by company name, figures out what if they're in a deal, if there's any recent sales team notes, if there's any interaction I should know of, and then it also goes and searches internal

comm's history. So within my Gmail to

comm's history. So within my Gmail to see our private prior relationship, if any, within Slack to see if there's any call outs to their company. And so it's it's doing all these things that I would

do manually. And then it's delivering me

do manually. And then it's delivering me two outputs in the end. So one of them is tasks for my actual prep with all

this in it. So I like it to create a task in to-d doist which is my to-do list app with the within a certain project of meeting prep. It pulls in all of this information with this

intelligence from the agent and and tells me to prep for it. It puts it on my calendar for 2 hours before the meeting start time. So you can see what that looks like in real life. You know,

here here's a couple meetings I have next week and they're automatically cued in my to-do list. But the second thing it does is delivers this weekly digest

to Slack. So this is and you could do

to Slack. So this is and you could do this day by day too if you have a ton of meetings. But again, I'm I'm mostly

meetings. But again, I'm I'm mostly internal. So I have it create a

internal. So I have it create a structured digest which includes all of the meetings and intelligence. um any

error handling I might need to know like if the agent couldn't find someone or if there's anywhere I should do a manual follow-up. And then it does this like

follow-up. And then it does this like pulls its own uses its own creativity to create these insights for me about uh

what I should pay most attention to for this upcoming week. So I can pull up a uh real example here. So I just ran this this morning just for this example, but it's going looking at the next week.

It's pulling all of the key meetings that require prep preparation. It's

saying, "Okay, so we have a team onboarding with fellow. We're changing

our AI note-taking app." And so it did some intelligence on who we're meeting with for this. It's confirming that this is a new vendor relationship. We've

we've previously purchased this meeting management. They're our implementation

management. They're our implementation specialist. And then, you know, here's

specialist. And then, you know, here's here's more context on this. So, it's

like it's it's serving at this kind of second brain for me where I yes, I have all this and part of my superpower as an EA is is remembering all these things about people, but this is making sure

that I don't it's not all in my head and and I can really refresh my memory quickly on all the context rather than diving through the CRM, my email, Slack and looking at all these things

separately. So, one place is is key. And

separately. So, one place is is key. And

then, um, it pulls in this like key prep recommendations at the end, which is where the agent gets a little bit creative here. So, it's saying I should

creative here. So, it's saying I should review my previous carve session. This

is a uh, EA automation session I do every once in a while. Tells me to prepare some new demos, tell me to familiarize myself with fellow before the onboarding session, and check with our head of marketing for PR priorities

before the agency call. So, I love that it, you know, does exactly what I need to do, like, you know, gives me all these preps in my to-do list and and does those actions, but it also kind of serves as like a double check. Maybe

there's something I haven't thought of.

Maybe I didn't think I needed to update my deck, and it gives me something new.

So, I think what's great about this agent is it does everything you want and then more. And and over time, you can

then more. And and over time, you can make it more intelligent. So as you as you learn how this works and so I'll give you an example of how this actually works in reality. So this is the test

that I pulled right before this call just to give us a clean Slack output.

And it walks you through step by step what this agent was thinking. It's like

okay I'm testing this. I'm going to go look at the calendar. I'm going to go research all these participants. You can

click in and see even more information about what it was thinking. Um, you can see that it went in HubSpot. Couldn't

find someone for there. Couldn't find

someone who probably didn't have a relationship with them. Oh, great. It

found someone. And then, um, it tells you everything it did. So, over time, if if something's not performing as you intended or you want to update it, you can really look at how this agent works

on the back end and give it some feedback. And we have this great

feedback. And we have this great co-pilot where you can go in and say um you could say like you could go into co-pilot and be like

oh uh I actually would love to have a hyperlink to their LinkedIn page included in my to-doist thing. So

you can say for each participant, can you also add a LinkedIn hyperlink within the Slack digest? So you can kind

of I always tell people when they're starting with an agent like this is progress over perfection. Like I started this one with just a quick digest. It

didn't h it didn't have our CRM connected. It didn't have that. And then

connected. It didn't have that. And then

over time I was like, "Oh, here's something else that might be helpful."

And so like build something basic. see

how it works, learn, and then it, you know, make time to improve it over time so that you make sure it's really being impactful for you and doing all of the things it can. And, you know, these

tools are getting smarter every day. So,

also keep on top of, you know, the new new capabilities so you can start building those into agents and and automations and things that you've built in the past. So, that's a quick overview

of the agent. Something I want to I want to call out for folks is I think this workflow um highlights a couple strategies that I think people really

need to think about. One is I tell people if you are doing a repeated task every week, spend time that week

automating that task. And so I um when I had fancy jobs um had an EA as well, we had a very similar process where on Fridays we would actually do a retro of the past week, prep for the next week,

find out like all the stuff we needed to prep, make sure that I knew everything that needed to happen. And instead of spending that hour doing that prep on a Friday, I highly recommend people just

say this this week I'm gonna spend that hour automate automating this into an agent >> and see if I can replace that flow. And

so I think that's a really useful mindset to bring into what and when you can automate.

>> Yeah.

>> The second thing I would say is I love agents in particular. the sort of like natural language format of describing agents because you can literally just narrate what you would do. You would be

like, first I would go and Google and I would look at all the meetings for the next week and I would decide which ones I need to prep uh prep for. Then I would go look at my email and see what the

heck we're actually meeting about. Then

I would dig through SA Slack. I would

probably go look at HubSpot. And then I would, if I was doing a great job, organize it in this way, send it to myself in Slack as a reminder and create a bunch of to-dos.

>> Like you can actually use that natural language to describe an agent structure.

And so I think it's a really natural way for people to get started designing some of these workflows. Yeah, I agree. Like

I think of agents when I first started using them, I I kind of started thinking of them as interns almost. So they're

not going to operate and do something completely independently from the start.

But if you can teach the intern your system and how you think and give it the tools it needs, then over time your intern gets smart enough to to run and

do things on their own. And so, you know, this is something that now I I rarely touch this agent because it works as I as I planned consistently. Um, you

know, right now that was a good little ad that I just I just did for the LinkedIn profile, so I can quickly add them. But, you know, there's there's not

them. But, you know, there's there's not much else I have to do here. And now

I've given myself the time back. And

even bigger, I can showcase this to everyone at Zapier, enable them with this template which you can share, and then everyone can have this meeting prep agent. they can, you know, they can add

agent. they can, you know, they can add different things if if this isn't their exact workflow, like not everyone uses to-d doist or, you know, not everyone wants XYZ, but they can customize it for their own. And so, I think it's like,

their own. And so, I think it's like, yeah, teach teach people how to fish and and teach these interns your your way of thinking, these agents. And over time, you'll be surprised of of how much you

can do. I think from EAS, I hear like,

can do. I think from EAS, I hear like, oh, you know, AI doesn't think the way I do. I'm like, it can though. like can um

do. I'm like, it can though. like can um as long as you can figure out the system behind why you're doing things and be able to articulate that. But yeah, I I love the like um the dictate to co-pilot

too because I do that. I'm like, "Okay, so usually I talk to it just like that, like as if I'm on a walk with a friend and and see what it comes back with."

And so, yeah, this is this is like one of those things that's just a no-brainer to spend a little bit of time on and then you it just runs in the background.

>> Yeah. And I think you know EAS in particular are so well positioned to make some of these tools for the broader organization because

you know you're a point of leverage in a team and if you can systematize that leverage I think two things happen. One

you can do a higher level job supporting your exec or your team. two, everybody

else gets a little bit of of a boost that you wouldn't be able to personally give them. And so, yeah,

give them. And so, yeah, >> I think, you know, everybody should think like, oh my gosh, I could have my own little mini, you know, assistant or I could have my own little army of

interns if I can just describe what I need them to do. And I think that's really interesting. The last thing I

really interesting. The last thing I will say is I have a very almost exact workflow in Zapier Agents. It's called

my Sunday scaries prep. I do it on Sundays when I start to feel lots of anxiety.

>> Yeah.

>> Now, um what I'm planning for the next week. And the one ad that I put in here

week. And the one ad that I put in here is you can actually mix professional and personal stuff.

>> So, I put in there if my mornings allow me to walk my kids to school, block off, you know, this hour to this hour because I know I can like walk the kids to

school and by Sunday, if you haven't booked me on an early morning, you don't get me. And so

get me. And so >> like add these little, >> you know, call out days that I don't have time scheduled for lunch. Like call

out days where I have six hours of backtobacks with no break. Like give me an opportunity to improve my calendar.

So I do think in addition to prep, you can do a little like calendar optimization, too, which is really nice.

Totally. I agree. Like yeah, which meetings might be able to combine uh or get rid of that look duplicative? you

know, give it give me some recommendations for optimizing my focus time. Like totally the sky's is the

time. Like totally the sky's is the limit with with these things. And yeah,

you can totally combine personal and professional calendars into this to make it a jack of all trades and do everything. But this one, yeah, this one

everything. But this one, yeah, this one for me is focus on work, >> you know. And then if you really want hyper efficiency, you just make an agent that says buy all the meetings, cancel all of them, give me my day back.

>> Yeah. The the Ron wants an agent. I

don't know if you watch Parks and Recreation, but uh April Lgate scheduled all of his meetings for like March 31st one year cuz she didn't think that existed. And then

existed. And then perfect schedule all my meetings for March 31st. You know, you have one other

March 31st. You know, you have one other meeting related workflow which I think is really interesting which is making sure that the meetings that you do really are high value.

>> Yeah.

>> Um so I'd love to for you to walk us through what you do there. Totally. So

there's a few things um on the other side of meetings that I do. So one of them is you know this is uh Wade the CEO of Zapier. So I was basically the way

of Zapier. So I was basically the way this workflow came up was we use Fathom for our meeting note-taking. So I was

manually going into fathom after each executive meeting and giving it a prompt like how did we perform against the five dysfunctions of a team which is a framework we use from the table group or

who in this meeting could have spoke up more and I was giving it prompts to see how Fathom did with more reasoning and more of a loose like seedback creative

prompt versus what were the action items which of course it does excellently and over time I was like this is pretty useful. And so I was manually doing that

useful. And so I was manually doing that in Fathom sending it to the exec team and Wade sent me this message. He's

like, I feel like we need to turn this meeting coaching on across the org. It's

a pretty useful accountability mechanism. I think the other thing here

mechanism. I think the other thing here is when feedback is maybe automated uh growth feedback is one of our values. So

it's part of how the company runs. that

when feedback is expected after a meeting and becomes a part of routine and coaching then folks learn to expect it and it's part of their behavior and it doesn't make their like you know that

nervousness spike up when they get feedback come in. So I think the more feedback folks can get the better but I think the other thing this does is takes some spit off the ball. So, uh, so you

know, after meetings, I've worked at this team, this exec team for 5 years.

So, no one would be offended if I said like, you know, Brandon, you really like should have spoken up on that topic. I

can call them out because they've given me the permission to do that. But for

folks who are newer to organization or don't have that comfort level with the team, you can build this meeting coaching across the org to and automate

it based on any meeting transcript. So,

you know, I started working with him uh with uh you know, with Fellow cuz we're moving over to Fellow for AI note-taking and was testing an agent. You know, I

was giving Wade, you know, here's an example of the feedback it generated. It

gave him speaking time. It gave him, you know, what went well. It gave him opportunities to amplify impact. And

then he's like, "This coaching is too soft. Like, this this is still what went

soft. Like, this this is still what went well. Let's have it be tougher." So then

well. Let's have it be tougher." So then I gave it, you know, I fixed the agent instructions to give it a better balance of being demanding and supportive, which is a term we use a lot um here at Zapier

of like you have to be a demanding leader but you also have to be supportive. So I gave him this one which

supportive. So I gave him this one which which did uh did give some more growth opportunities like address misalignment more directly, you know, challenge the decision-m speed. it seems like you have

decision-m speed. it seems like you have some fear of conflict. And so we worked at that, gave it a more concise version, thought it was good enough to ship. And

then so now we've we've shipped this kind of meeting feedback automation system um through through Fellow. But

this basically takes all of the transcript content, meeting metadata.

Make sure there's some, you know, some parameters like if a meeting is only 10 minutes, probably not worth the feedback. And and make sure it's only

feedback. And and make sure it's only zap your employees. make sure there's, you know, only sufficient context to offer valuable specific feedback. And

then for each participant, I can look up their Slack, match their email address to Slack, and then send them some, [clears throat] you know, some some feedback. And I gave it context on our

feedback. And I gave it context on our company values, you know, some of our meeting norms, you know, how we think about decision-m and then these are impact behaviors for like what we expect

from folks at Zapier. And then I gave it the five distinctions of a team. And so

I really worked on this prompt over time to help it generate this direct constructive feedback on all these dimensions and then you know you can see uh what the outcome is going to be and

this is uh you know clarifies it's AI generated it's coming from a bot gives you know very quick feedback after a meeting of one to two specific growth opportunities and and one to two things

they they can do next time. So this is something that I think can over time really just change the way that a team works together and and change the

usefulness of a meeting. So this is a maybe not something that was a huge part of my job and I don't calculate this as like a big timesaving agent for myself kind of like the the meeting prep was,

but this is something that's like really reinforcing the the company culture and making folks better at their job. So, I

think this is it's cool to build stuff like this that's more um that's more just enablement and accountability for folks, especially among the exec teams. So, you make sure that they're being

like the best displayers of of company values and norms over time. So, this is a fun one that uh that I had I had a good time creating with Wade. This

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AI. So Courtney, what I think is great about this is people really think that culture is hard to systematically reinforce. You really think that culture

reinforce. You really think that culture has to be something that individuals or leaders have to carry through sort of soft interactions with the organization.

But what you're showing here is more than hey can I give you you know skills coaching on closing a customer or I give

you communication coaching on managing stakeholders. This is are we embracing

stakeholders. This is are we embracing our operating principles, our cultural norms? Are we keeping an eye out for

norms? Are we keeping an eye out for issues in interpersonal conflict or communication that we know teams are biased towards? And are we creating sort

biased towards? And are we creating sort of a egoportive system in order to continually check and

keep ourselves accountable to that system? And so I think like take the

system? And so I think like take the meeting part of this aside, the ability to kind of consistently check interactions and projects and

initiatives inside your organization with alignment on your stated cultural norms is a really powerful thing. And

you know, you mentioned table group.

I've worked with them before and like you get you get them like once a quarter and all this great work for your leaders and you're like yeah we're going to like be the best team we're totally aligned

>> giving everybody feedback but they're not whispering in your ear during the executive me I mean I'm sure they would for a price but during your executive meetings you know they're not listening

into your company you know town halls or amas and so I think this is just such a nice way to observe your organization from a third party kind of like vantage

point.

>> Yeah.

>> And then as you said like just normalize feedback. This is very stressful

feedback. This is very stressful feedback for people to receive maybe from their boss.

>> Yeah.

>> Like hey you didn't do this or you didn't do that. But if you know everybody in the meeting is getting feedback.

It's coming from sort of a neutral evaluation place.

Then you might be more open to hearing and kind of adjusting your your behaviors based on that feedback. Yeah,

totally. I think I think you hit the nail on the head with with a few of the main reasons why I like this. I think

it's are we who we say we are? You know,

are are you who you say the are we what we say our culture is? And and are we keeping that top of mind in between things like, you know, we're a fully remote company. We do only meet with

remote company. We do only meet with table group once a quarter, once a half.

And so, we need to keep these behaviors top of mind consistently and folks have a hard time keeping anything top of mind for that long. And so making sure this is repetitive and continuing to

reinforce those things is valuable. But

yeah, we've I mean we've got the other type of agent for, you know, sales reps, for example, that gives them after gone calls what they could have done that's more like, okay, you should have brought up this ROI or this metric or, you know,

more specific sales coaching. But

>> I I love the the culture stuff.

>> Okay, this is great. So we have um schedule prep, we have culture checkpoints, which I think are awesome.

But let's answer the question with AI that I'm not saying every IC manager and leader in the organization thinks about a lot but they might which is

will this fly with CEO or will this fly with executive A or how do I know I'm not walking into into a tough meeting.

So, you've done you've done some work to sort of stress test what your CEO might want or participate in without having to

bother him. So, I'd love to see your

bother him. So, I'd love to see your sort of exec replicate uh workflows.

>> Totally. So yeah, again on the meeting side, but this is a GPT I built within OpenAI's tribute and it's we have this

public feed in Slack which is feed t-ups which are basically any strategic doc that need review across the company.

We've kind of centralized this in a feed for transparency, accountability, and make sure folks know why we're making certain decisions. And so the folks were

certain decisions. And so the folks were often coming to me for thought partnership of like, hey, here's my doc.

Do you have any feedback on it before I share this with Exec, you know, you know how Wade thinks. You've worked with them for 5 years. What would you think about this? And I love doing that thought

this? And I love doing that thought partnership stuff and I don't want to replace it, but again, it's not scalable and I don't want to be a bottleneck for someone to get their doc out into the

world. And so I built a GPT that kind of

world. And so I built a GPT that kind of thinks like like I do and and has some of the same materials of like company values and and norms, but it helps

people sharpen these teaups. And so

sometimes it makes sure that, you know, folks come into a meeting with more confidence and their opinions are stress tested and the right data is included and make sure we make the most of those meetings that we're in. But sometimes

the teaup is so clear uh now that we can skip the meeting entirely, which is great as well. So you can see here like, you know, Wade said he he tried it out, caught several things that would strengthen the work. We've got, you

know, Lindsay saying, "I was worried it would just tear my doc apart, but it suggested really great simple tweaks."

And so we gave it a bunch of knowledge.

So I I'll dive into that right now. So

um this is exact GBT. Um I gave it a prompt here to say give feedback on a t-up doc, which was one of the main prompts considered. And I created a fake

prompts considered. And I created a fake doc which is a very very poor teaup just to give an example for this. Um so this was a teaup that basically I just said

create a really bad EAP doc. Um so this this is like you know gives a really loose purpose. It you know doesn't have

loose purpose. It you know doesn't have an approver. It's like

an approver. It's like >> just something we've been thinking about. Doesn't have much background. So

about. Doesn't have much background. So

it's it's a bad doc. So it's not but it's not going to give you the the most exciting feedback. But it goes in and

exciting feedback. But it goes in and again like takes the spit off the ball of feedback and helps people uh you know get more confident. But this is saying you know this reads more like a jam

session than a tea up. You will get better feedback if you clarify these things. Let's tighten it up. And so it

things. Let's tighten it up. And so it gives a quick read of what you have.

Gives feedback on how to strengthen it to surface trade-offs. Add a

recommendation.

And then, you know, it gives an example rewrite even in this case because the doc was so loose on on details, but it gives, you know, a couple top fixes before the bullpen and then which is

what we call these kind of tea meetings and then one bold coaching question. So,

I I love uh that it does this and even gives you a suggested next step like let's let's give a tight Wade style one-page rewrite of this so it's bullpen

ready. So, uh, I love that. And this,

ready. So, uh, I love that. And this,

uh, this GPT is built off of the back of I'll dive into it really quick, but it's built off the back of, uh, you know, again, our team norms, our revenue

roadmap, our strategy memo, good examples of T-ups, you know, Wade feedback tuning, a managing of to Wade dock. So it gives like all of this

dock. So it gives like all of this context on the back end that can help simulate people's feedback again to make sure they're sharper, clearer, and better at unlocking decisions. So uh I

love this one because it's again just helps enable everyone at Zapier. I love

when the things that I build don't only help me but then can have these kind of ripple effects within the organization.

I think that's how you can become really an AI champion and transform your org is by starting with your own wins. you

know, start with your own meeting prep or whatever, but then be like, okay, how can I enable the next set of folks on this? How can we meet this like world

this? How can we meet this like world orwide? And so, I love that. I love that

orwide? And so, I love that. I love that this is really something anybody can use, you know, on the I I created in chat to BT for many reasons, but one of them being that I don't have context to

the conversation, so folks can really feel comfortable putting all of their information in there and making sure that, you know, no one's on the back end like reviewing it. Um, I think we can

see the I think we can see some analytics here on, you know, 278 people have have used this to sharpen a strategy doc. So again, it feeds back

strategy doc. So again, it feeds back into things like my impact reviews and showing that I'm enabling the whole org.

So, I I love this one as well for just making sure our meetings are more efficient, making sure I'm not a bottleneck. And then I can still provide

bottleneck. And then I can still provide my coaching where where it makes sense and I can still have those people where I'm thought partnering on with their docs, but this helps me scale me basically and scale the exacts before it gets to a meeting.

>> Yeah. And what I would say is people also love when you come to an exact meeting or a feedback session where you say, "I've already checked it against

our strategy or I've already tried to do a loop of this with this GBT." Like just that extra effort to go through an independent loop before taking

synchronous time to get feedback is both probably improving the quality of your work, but also just saving people time and it people really appreciate it. So I

think that sort of initiative is also useful. And what I want to go to for our

useful. And what I want to go to for our last use case is really you've extended strategic thinking through through the organization with

another tool. So I'd love to see kind of

another tool. So I'd love to see kind of our last um strategic alignment tool that you've built using AI because I think it's a really neat one. Yeah. So

one thing we we just launched about a month ago is in notebook LM. So this is uh enabled through through Google and uh

this is like the announcement we made in Slack to give you uh a high view of of why we did this and what it is. But it's

basically a strategy companion which uh we know that folks have a hard time looking at this big picture strategy work sometimes and then saying okay how does that impact me? And sometimes it's

just hard to find the answers you're looking for within all these different strategy docs all hands meetings. And so

we gave folks this basically knowledge base here. Here here's a screenshot of it of of what these look like in reality. I just, you know, cleared out the summary of our strategy [clears throat] to make sure I'm not

like, you know, totally revealing everything here. But what's great is

everything here. But what's great is that we can continue to add sources over time. So you can see we've got a few

time. So you can see we've got a few dozen sources in here which are everything from the top level strategy doc to all hands we've had to transcripts from other meetings we've

had around strategy to every org's strategic action plan and so folks can go and interact with these but they can also interact with this in a chat capacity and ask it anything they want.

So here's an example of it in in real life. Uh, so you know, I'm saying I just

life. Uh, so you know, I'm saying I just gave it a simple prompt of as an executive assistant, how can I contribute to Zapier's 2026 strategy?

And it's saying, "Oh, that's a great question. We I think you can help with

question. We I think you can help with champion clarity, focus, and speed. Make

sure we're spending time on the right priorities. You know, make sure that

priorities. You know, make sure that you're driving internal AI transformation." And so, I love that it

transformation." And so, I love that it gives me, you know, some of that and and connects back to the sources. But

there's also fun things here like this uh it autogenerates a podcast. So I

don't know if I'm fully sharing my computer sound here, but I'll play it for a couple of seconds. This is fully AI generated just based off of the back of these sources. So it talks like this.

>> Welcome to the deep dive. Today we're uh really giving you the essential shortcut here. Absolute alignment on the

here. Absolute alignment on the strategy.

>> We're pulling the core ideas straight from the Zap year 2026. And all of this is AI generated of of things you can create. So it really helps make the

create. So it really helps make the strategy interactive instead of a static doc and static thing and helps folks get their questions answered again before going to their leader or going to

someone in their org. And so I love this for just enabling folks to be able to connect their work and be able to query this over time. And it's something that we can keep updated and and make sure

that it has the most recent information so everyone can can get value out of it.

So Courtney, I love these use cases.

What I keep reflecting on is people are like, "Oh, EA's EAS are going to go in this age of AI." And I'm like, "Have you worked with a fabulous EA?" Because the

second they automate one task, they figure out 10 more that are so high leverage for the organization.

culture carrying behaviors, strategic like communication, operational efficiency, like you are just demonstrating that this can happen at a next level. And so, zooming back

out, what we saw today was everything from helping yourself dig dig out of a busy calendar with meeting prep to enforcing your cultural goals and

leadership norms through always on feedback, checking feedback ahead of a synchronous meeting so you can make sure it's aligned with both how executives want to

receive it, but also kind of the important business initiatives and goals of the company. And then finally, how you can take all this content that's always I mean, I just don't know an

organization that is not consistently writing strategy documents, just one strategy document to the next, big strategy document, little strategy document, strategy update, strategy

goals. And so just creating a

goals. And so just creating a purpose-built repository for that information that can then be accessed in a multimodal way for people to learn,

align their work, be educated, all that kind of stuff. I think is super awesome.

So these were really, really great workflows. We're going to do quick

workflows. We're going to do quick lightning round and then we will get you out of here. I think the first thing is kind of this thing I I said which is a

lot of people think your role is going away or they're afraid of AI um taking over this role and I think you're showing actually you're just becoming so

much higher leverage and have to be having so much more fun. So tell me how do you respond to to that feedback around AI and in particular the kind of

EA role? I definitely am a believer that

EA role? 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. There is

simply too much to do. I think there's the one of the biggest problems that EAs have is we always have more work that we want to do than we have time for. And so

that's what it's consistently hearing, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time. Like this is how we can do

enough time. Like this is how we can do that. And I I mean to I don't like

that. And I I mean to I don't like talking about myself very much, but to humble brag and tie this back to Real Impact, I've I've gotten three promotions since I've been here and been

able to work myself out of multiple roles and, you know, I think that this is how you can do that. you can be this really great AI partner for your company

and make sure that you're at the forefront and take all that busy manual repetitive work off your plate so you can be do the human stuff, the fun stuff, the stuff you like to do, the

stuff that's creative, um, and and relationship driven and those things that we wish we had time for. And so I

think that it's just it's such an exciting thing for our role and I don't think it's going to take our jobs. There

may be you know certain admin things it does take eventually but it's not going to take the whole thing. Think about the scope of what we do. Our whole job is to be you know all wide across the org and

a little bit of depth in each area. But

now you can be wide across the or have more depth and have more time for for projects and special things that you can do for your team.

>> Okay. So speaking of special things, you have been one of the people I think is closest to answering this question which is how close do you think we are to

replicating executives? How happy is

replicating executives? How happy is Wade with your AI versions of him? And

do you think we're actually working towards a world where those get quite high fidelity relative to individuals preferences, feedback, thought process, communication process? Yeah, it's a

communication process? Yeah, it's a great question. I think there are

great question. I think there are certain parts where we're getting kind of close on. So over time, you know, I used to think of myself as a clone of Wade in certain instances. I could write

coms like him. I could run his schedule.

I could do things like him. And now

we've we've got a clone of AI tools that are helping me do things like him, too.

So, there's certain parts of of what he thinks and does that we're pretty close to replicating with these AI tools. What

I'm not sure of is Wade or any exec. Um, but speaking just for Wade here, he's a constant learner.

He is he is ingesting so much information, learning new things, trying new things, building every day like hands on keyboard. like the amount uh he

can grow and learn like the pace of that is so high that I wonder how you could keep these models up to date with that because

>> like I you know I know they they update fast but like how can you how can you grow at at the pace of of someone's brain and and how your evolving does change your thought process does change

over time so there's things old things in Zapier history where someone's like oh I heard Wade said we'll never do XYZ and you're like that was an old decision. That was an old decision. Like

decision. That was an old decision. Like

I have so much new context that's changing the way I think. And so for a leader who's constantly adapting, changing the way they think and using new information to help them make

smarter decisions. How do you how do you

smarter decisions. How do you how do you replicate that part of it? I don't know.

There's things that but the consistent side like how he writes internal memos or you know how he writes certain things are we're pretty close to replicating.

[laughter] Okay. And then final question. When um

Okay. And then final question. When um

AI Wade is not replying to you the way you want or you're not getting what you need out of a specific prompt, what is your prompting technique? Do you are you all an all caps girl? Do you what do you

what do you do here? O I am not an all caps girl. I'm a ramble. So I love the

caps girl. I'm a ramble. So I love the dictate feature and I love to talk to it and I give it feedback very very direct.

I'm just very direct as a person and and demanding and so I do that. I'm like, I don't understand why you're doing it this way. Show me a reasoning of why you

this way. Show me a reasoning of why you did it that way because I told you to do this and this is what I'd like to see and here's the feedback I have. And I

just ramble and give it, you know, everything I'm thinking. I think folks like sometimes don't know where to start and and try to give it this very specific feedback and write it. No, just

like give it top of mind, pretend it's someone with no feelings and be demanding. So, I don't know. Hopefully

demanding. So, I don't know. Hopefully

the AI robots don't come for me. I do

think people can thank you sometimes.

So, Good, good, good. AI,

>> AI, we uh we we we know you have feelings. I don't know. We'll see

feelings. I don't know. We'll see

[laughter] what happens in 10 years.

>> Yeah. Um Okay, Courtney, this has been so great. Where can we find you and how

so great. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful? Yeah. So, uh feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I

love posting about additional use cases, things I'm building, workshops we're having. But I' I'd love for y'all to

having. But I' I'd love for y'all to check out this EA Exec Ops AI playbook I just made recently, which has like, you know, six different categories of things that the EAS do consistently and

different ways we've we've automated that and ways that folks can replicate it and give me feedback on it. I'd love

to I'd love to hear what we're missing, what we can build out more. I'm looking

for new things to build all the time, so I love I love getting feedback from the community on what would be helpful.

>> Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us.

>> Yeah, thank you, Claire.

Thanks so much for watching. If you

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