Zapier’s CEO called a “code red” when GPT-4 launched.
About Wade
- Co-founded Zapier in 2011; CEO since day one
- Built Zapier into a platform connecting 8,000+ apps
- Scaled Zapier to 3M+ users, incl. Disney, Meta & Samsung
- Repositioned Zapier as an AI orchestration hub for agents
- Led a company-wide AI reset after GPT-4 to transform ops
| 1:32
On Pioneers of AI, host Rana el Kaliouby talks with Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster about the moment GPT-4 launched and he sounded an internal alarm. His response: pause the entire company for a week and make everyone, engineers or not, build something with AI.
Transcript
Note: Transcripts may be automatically generated and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.
Take us back to this moment in 2023. ChatGPT4 just launched. You saw both a concern and an opportunity, and you called for an internal code red. The capability improvement was obvious. You know, what happens when 4.5 comes out? What happens when 5 comes out? Are they going to get better and better? Are they going to get cheaper and cheaper? Even if one of those things is true, this is very impactful to the whole industry and to what we work on. We weren't exactly sure what to do with that yet, but we were like, we need people to pay attention internally. We didn't even know what a code red... No one even had any sort of like, oh, when Wade calls a code red, here are the steps that you take. It was just like code red, and people were like, okay, I hear that that's important. What do we do? Now, I remember teeing up like a handful of things that we were like, okay, this is what I want to change in terms of how we operate. When I look back at that time though, I would say there was really one thing that stood out as being more effective than anything else. We paused the company for an entire week and ran a hackathon. Didn't matter if you're in engineering or not. Everyone's going to put your hand on a keyboard and you're going to build something with AI. As a result, more and more of the company started to build an intuition around what is this technology? What is it capable of? And I think that just company pause where it was like, hey, we need to just go do some sense making together. I have since seen be like productive for almost any other company that does one of these. They all cite the like hands-on learning time being way more impactful than the CEO or the AI committee or any of that kind of stuff.
