In February 2026, Zapier's Chief Marketing and AI Transformation Officer Dan Slagen called a “code red” on his own marketing team.
On paper, they looked ahead of the curve: Everyone had their AI tools and was using them, but Slagen saw a shift coming. Marketers wouldn't be judged on how well they used AI chat tools, they'd be competing with people who could build their own apps, dashboards, and digital twins using agentic tools like Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code.
In this AI Transformations episode, Mike Kaput talks with Slagen about what happened next: how Zapier moved its marketing org from AI adoption to AI-native work, the three tiers of builders that emerged, the “lossless marketing” idea behind Zapier's AI-powered marketing brain, and why working in public turned out to matter more than any single tool.
Listen or watch below—and see below for show notes and the transcript.
00:00:00 — Intro
00:03:50 — Introducing Dan Slagen
00:06:12 — The February “code red” - what changed and why Dan called it
00:10:53 — How the team adopted AI after the code red
00:12:05 — Building Zapier's AI-powered marketing brain
00:15:52 — Bringing in agentic expertise and charting the steps
00:21:25 — The behavioral side: how people interact with the machines
00:23:25 — How the average marketer connects to the central brain
00:26:31 — Impacts and benefits
00:30:30 — Where it got harder or messier than expected
00:32:11 — Dan's advice for leaders who feel behind
This episode is presented by Google Cloud:
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Learn more about Google Cloud here: https://cloud.google.com/
Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI, thanks to Descript, and has not been edited for content.
[00:00:00] Dan Slagen: At the moment, I don't feel like learning the next tool or the next thing is where I need the team to go. You've learned what you need to learn at this point. Now, are you gonna take it upon yourself to change the way you work or not?
[00:00:12] Mike Kaput: Welcome to AI Transformations, a special series from the Artificial Intelligence Show.
[00:00:18] I'm Mike Kaput, chief Content Officer at SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'll be your host. Every business's AI journey looks different. In each of these episodes, I sit down with leaders who have lived through real AI transformation, including the actual stories, the pain points that push them to act, the moment things started to click, and the results they can point to today.
[00:00:41] So join us as we accelerate AI Literacy for All as part of our AI transformations series. Welcome everyone to episode 231 of the Artificial Intelligence Show. I am Mike Kaput, co-host of the Artificial Intelligence Show [00:01:00] and Chief Content Officer here at SmarterX. Now, you might start to understand that today's episode is a little different than your regularly scheduled programming.
[00:01:09] This is a special episode in a limited series we're running called AI Transformations. Presented by Google Cloud. So in this series, we are spotlighting how real companies are driving real change using AI. In each of these episodes, we'll explore how leaders at some of the world's top companies are actively using AI to transform how their teams, departments, or even entire organizations work.
[00:01:34] And we're looking at things like what sparked their transformation. What work looked like before AI, how their journeys unfolded. Sometimes we'll talk about what got messy along the way, and we'll of course talk about what results AI is starting to unlock for the business. We're doing all that with a bit of a different format than our typical episodes, which is interviewing these leaders firsthand right here on the show.
[00:01:57] Including the leader here. Joining me today, [00:02:00] Dan Slagen from Zapier. Much more on Dan in just a minute here, but just a little more context into this series before we dive in. We are doing this in partnership with our good friends at Google Cloud for a simple reason, which is often AI transformation can feel.
[00:02:16] Abstract. Everyone's kind of talking about it, but far fewer people are showing what this looks like in practice inside real companies. So the goal of these episodes is hopefully to make AI transformation much more concrete for you. We want you to hear how other leaders are approaching it, what they're learning, and what practical lessons you can apply as you think about AI.
[00:02:37] In your own organization, and if you are a regular podcast listener, don't worry me and Paul will still be back doing our regular weekly episode of the show. Paul and Cathy are still doing their AI answers episode, so nothing here really changes except you get even more episodes of the Artificial Intelligence Show thanks to this series.
[00:02:56] So with that. Let me get right into this. So today's [00:03:00] episode is brought to you by Gemini Enterprise. Businesses of every shape and size are turning to ai. They're learning how to move faster, do more, and improve their performance. But you can't just hand your data over to any platform. You need a trusted partner with years of experience, and that's where Gemini Enterprise comes in.
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[00:03:44] That's cloud.google.com/. Gemini Enterprise.
[00:03:50] Mike Kaput: Alright, so super excited for today's episode. Today we are talking with Dan Slagen, the Chief Marketing and AI Transformation Officer at Zapier. Now, [00:04:00] Zapier, you probably know of it, is one of the defining companies in automation. For years, they've been helping businesses connect the apps they use every day and automate repetitive work all without needing engineers.
[00:04:12] Now, as AI is changing what software can do, Zapier is building around a bigger idea, AI orchestration. Where AI tools, agents, workflows, models, data and business apps all work together so AI can actually take action. Dan is here because Zapier's marketing team is living that type of transformation from the inside.
[00:04:34] We'll talk all about this, but at the end of last year, Dan says his team looked like a normal ahead of the curve marketing team on ai. People had access to the expected tools, and they were using them, but by early this year. In 2026, he saw a more important shift coming. Marketers were no longer just going to be judged by how well they used AI chat tools.
[00:04:55] They were gonna be competing with people who could use AI builder tools like [00:05:00] Cursor Codex, Claude Code, and Zapier's MCP, to build their own apps, dashboards, workflows, and even digital twins. So in February, Dan called a Code Red to get the marketing organization, not just AI savvy. But AI native, and since then, Zapier's marketing team has been moving from AI adoption into AI native work.
[00:05:21] Team members have built and named their own digital twins. They've started working in builder tools. They've be begun creating systems that change how marketing work gets done. We'll even talk about how Zapier has started developing its own AI powered marketing brain. A shared department level system meant to centralize the freshest context across Zapier's market.
[00:05:44] Customers, competitors, campaigns and more. It then gives the teams AI tools and agents the current context they need to help create, plan, and execute work. Dan, welcome to the show. I'd love to get into it with you. Thanks for being here for one.
[00:05:59] Dan Slagen: Sounds good. Can't [00:06:00] wait.
[00:06:00] Mike Kaput: So let's start right at the beginning here.
[00:06:03] at the end of last year, you had kind of mentioned to me when we chatted, Zapier's marketing team looked like a normal ahead of the curve marketing team on ai.
[00:06:12] Mike Kaput: I'm curious what actually was changing that made you call that code red in February of this year?
[00:06:19] Dan Slagen: The marketing team and everyone at Zapier we're quite fortunate in the sense that we pretty much have access to anything in the world of ai.
[00:06:27] It doesn't matter what tool we want to use, what LLM we want to use, Zapier is just an incredible company to allow people to use those tools. So to your point, yeah, end of last year, everyone's using their LM of choice and their building systems and it looked good, but then you could start to see around, to your point, end of Q4 last.
[00:06:47] Marketers, non-dev, starting to use some of these dev tools for the first time. And at first it didn't seem like much. Someone did something on Claude Code, and the reaction was, all right, that's interesting, but probably a one-off. But then you saw another story and another, [00:07:00] and then you really started to see some interesting use cases, and you could very quickly see where this was going to go.
[00:07:05] And it seemed as though a new type of marketer was being born. And it was something where you couldn't quite tell how big it was going to be, but not something that I wanted the team to miss out on. So Zapier is a hundred percent fully remote company, but once a year we get together, everyone, all 900 or so of us.
[00:07:24] And so we were in Los Angeles together for a week in February, and I had the marketing team together for a three or four hour session. And said, we're just gonna get into where I think marketing is going and how AI is going to influence it. And I really need you guys to know what's in my head. So I brought in someone from the outside who was already a cursor expert, and this individual had already built their own digital twin, was doing all the things that I thought were interesting, but almost no one on the team was doing.
[00:07:54] I'd say maybe 5% of the folks on the marketing team were at this person's level. [00:08:00] And so I had that person come in and sort of share the way they thought about AI's impact on marketing. They actually showed their digital twin, how they built it, the markdown files, everything in there. And it was really interesting to watch the team watch the presentation.
[00:08:12] Mm-hmm. Because within about five minutes, everyone's eyes had glazed over and people were starting to look. Confused, bored, frustrated, and this was probably a 40-minute presentation, and by the end of it, I sort of just asked, all right, who's feeling overwhelmed? And everyone's hand went up and my response to them was, this morning, you didn't even know that this person existed.
[00:08:34] You didn't know that you are potentially interviewing against this person for your next role at Zapier or outside of Zapier. Now, how do you feel? And I don't like to do leadership through fear or anything like that, but I think every once in a while you really need to have some of these aha moments.
[00:08:50] And for me, this felt like a really big aha moment for the team. We'd been through a couple of cycles in the past, you know, I remember the first time Midjourney came out and then the first time LLMs. You know, [00:09:00] really started to make their advancements, but this felt like, okay, this is something we need to pay attention to.
[00:09:04] So what we did coming out of that was I told the team, look, we are gonna build with you. We are gonna help you every step along the way. I gave the team three weeks, and I said, three weeks from now, I need everyone to be up and running on Cursor. If you really feel like you need to get on Claude Code or Codex or whatever, it is fine.
[00:09:23] And of course we had one or two outliers, but for the most part, let's get up on Cursor. I also assigned five coaches who were internal folks who really were spiking in their AI usage that could help with getting people onboarded. And I said, I'm not gonna ask those five people any questions. They're not gonna tell me who called, who asked for help, what questions you asked.
[00:09:42] I don't care. I just need to know. In three weeks, everyone's up on cursor. Then after that we're gonna do a two-week Build-On. And so everyone on the team got together with folks, and they said, what do we wanna build? And it was really interesting at the end of the Build-On, because we had almost three tiers of builders.
[00:09:58] Now you had the tier [00:10:00] ones, people just getting started for the first time. They probably built. a dashboard, fine. Then you had kind of the tier two, maybe they built, you know, a slightly better system or loop or something like that. And then your tier three is, you know, they built a, a whole software app basically, like our events team; we do a virtual conference later this year, not a hundred plus speakers.
[00:10:21] That's all gonna be managed now. Through an app that they built through Cursor and Zapier, which is just wild. So you have three different tiers, and the last part I'll say is coming out of that build. Then what was really nice about having three tiers is now, you know. What you can go to each tier with and give them new challenges to solve.
[00:10:39] So everyone feels like they're winning and advancing because the tier ones we're never gonna be able to compete with the tier threes and, and so on and so forth. So now we kind of have like three different groups of people, and we work with them in different ways to get them to the next level.
[00:10:53] Mike Kaput: That's awesome.
[00:10:53] Mike Kaput: So it sounds like February or so beginning of 2026 is kind of this code red then rolling [00:11:00] out specifically, it sounds like Cursor, which is an agentic coding tool, but used often by non coders to be able to do things like loops, automations, workflows, agentic work, and it sounds like that was given to basically everyone on the marketing team, regardless of technical background.
[00:11:16] Dan Slagen: Everyone on the marketing team, everyone from our product marketers to our brand designers. Yeah.
[00:11:21] Mike Kaput: Gotcha. And so those tiers are kind of where people naturally fell into it sounds like, in the months after the code red.
[00:11:29] Dan Slagen: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I. I will say one of our absolute best AI users on the team right now, mm-hmm.
[00:11:37] Is someone that works in customer marketing.
[00:11:39] Mike Kaput: Oh wow. Okay.
[00:11:40] Dan Slagen: Not someone that you would necessarily expect, but this person's a real leader on the team. It's amazing what they've been able to build. I've seen some really great stuff from the brand team. And you know, the flip side of that is I've also seen people in more technical roles that maybe didn't adopt as quickly because they felt like they were already ahead of the curve.
[00:11:57] So. Some of the things were [00:12:00] expected, but at the same time I was pleasantly surprised at some of the people that came out of the builder fund.
[00:12:05] Mike Kaput: So as everyone is building and racing ahead and learning even more about what's possible, it sounds like, maybe talk to me about how you got to this bigger idea of Zapier's AI-powered marketing brain.
[00:12:22] Dan Slagen: I feel like we're, I mean, we are moving. So fast right now. I know everyone is, but you know, we would do- it's like we would do a product launch in April, and you know, in the old SaaS world, by June, that's usually when your reps are starting to feel really, really confident. You know, they've gone through a couple sales calls, some have worked, some have not.
[00:12:43] They know what to hit on. They know their greatest hits, they know what to avoid. And now it seems like, man, product launch. In April, come June, you're starting to talk about the next thing. And we're seeing that across marketing too, is that we'll, we'll get really excited about something in January and then February be [00:13:00] able to hop on a completely different trend and run in a different direction.
[00:13:03] And, you know, we're still working under the overall vision of, of Zapier, but the specifics are changing a lot faster. So. I really wanted to have this notion of a shared brain. And we started talking about this in early, early Q1, and there were a couple of really interesting terms that were thrown out.
[00:13:19] You know, one, one way was we talked about was like lossless marketing.
[00:13:23] Dan Slagen: And you know, the example that someone on my team gave was like, if you have like an old video and you just start making copies of it by the ninth copy, it basically becomes completely blurry. And you think about that for anything that marketing does for go-to-market: you have an initial brief and it goes to the product marketing team, and then over to the sales team and maybe the exec team, right?
[00:13:44] And by the time it gets out into market, it's a, it's a fraction of what it was. And then the truth starts to get shattered across all the different channels that go out. The paid team might do a slightly different version on it. The social team might do a slightly different version on it. An events team has their own [00:14:00] spin, and so you really just start to lose.
[00:14:02] The truth and a shared vision of what the actual brand wants to put forward. And so we put this notion in place of if we could have this marketing brain that everyone's pulling from that at its most basic level, always has the most up-to-date goals, the most up-to-date brand guidelines. If we're doing a product launch, everything is coming from the exact same place.
[00:14:23] And so this notion, it almost breaks down to like three different places. One is that notion of like shared context. Mm-hmm. So people and agents are pulling from the exact same source of truth. Two would be those shared stories, which I talked about, so that we're all taking the same story out. It doesn't have to be the exact same version every time, but at least it comes from the exact same source of truth.
[00:14:45] And then the last notion is, okay, you have your context, you have your stories, you essentially have a shared knowledge base. Now you need shared sprints. So that is, you're going to market all those things, start to work together. And so that's what we've started to build. We've sort of launched our internal V one [00:15:00] of it, and it's been, it's been really great to see so far.
[00:15:04] It's interesting, you, you didn't ask me this question, but I'm gonna answer it. It's like, what's the next thing that you need your team to work on? Yeah. And I felt like a couple months ago, it was getting more into the Agentic tools and learning the cursors and codex and Claude Codes of the world. At the moment, I don't feel like learning the next tool or the next thing is where I need the team to go.
[00:15:27] I feel like it's changing the way they work to enable this marketing brain and this concept of lossless marketing to really start to flourish. And so there are a couple of components that get into that, which we can get into, but it's really okay. You've learned what you need to learn at this point. Now, are you gonna take it upon yourself to change the way you work or not?
[00:15:47] Mike Kaput: Yeah. I wanna spend some time talking about that. Before we get into that, I'm just kind of to chart the steps here.
[00:15:52] Mike Kaput: So you had, you know, a fairly tech-savvy marketing team using standard AI chat, say, call it ChatGPT, Claude, what have you. Then when you call this code red, you bring in someone who. Has far more experience using things like agentic tools like Cursor, Claude Code. Codex, et cetera, and show them what's possible with agentic work.
[00:16:14] Then we arm the team with tools like Cursor. They start, it sounds like, racing ahead, building for their specific roles, for their specific use cases. Before we get into this brain concept, do I have that kind of journey right? So far?
[00:16:27] Dan Slagen: Yeah, that's right. Right. And being able to have a really good connector.
[00:16:31] So whatever MCP you're choosing to use, obviously our team using Zapier, right. But being able to connect all the different systems and all the different apps that you're using back to the central brain. Yeah.
[00:16:39] Mike Kaput: Gotcha. Okay. So then we get to this point of the AI powered kind of marketing brain You've got that you're building, and as you build that, it sounds like.
[00:16:49] Now you're focused much more on how to use the brain effectively, like you just said, and how that changes the way you work. And I'm curious if you can maybe start talking to me a little bit about that, because I [00:17:00] know there are a few threads here of like, this doesn't just affect how you are talking to an AI tool or what technology you're using.
[00:17:07] This is. A change in how you communicate with the team, how you're sharing knowledge internally. Maybe walk me through what is the actual behavior manage or change in behavior looks like for this team? Yeah.
[00:17:21] Dan Slagen: I think the one that, that people find the most interesting right now is this notion of, of working in public.
[00:17:26] Mike Kaput: Okay.
[00:17:26] Dan Slagen: And so in order for the AI brain to be as effective as possible, it needs to have public surface areas that I can pull from. And so at Zapier, like everywhere else, there's parts that a brain can see and there's parts that it can't. So if I get on a phone call with you one-on-one, that's not gonna make its way into the marketing brain.
[00:17:45] If I send you a a one-to-one DM slack that's private, that's not gonna make its way into the brain. So it's this notion of can we rethink how much we work in public? For the benefit of the team, and it sounds [00:18:00] small, but I just went through my own shift here and it was a pretty wild, probably three-month transition.
[00:18:05] So at Zapier, working in public is critical and with a 900 or thousand, almost, almost a thousand people fully remote company, we do almost all of our communication slack. And so. How much time or what percentage of your slacks are posted in a public channel versus one-to-one DM actually gets measured.
[00:18:26] And at the exec level, it gets posted in front of the entire company at the end of every single month. So when I joined Zapier, I never measured this, but just by default, I was about 50 50, but 50% of my socks were one-to-one, and 50% weren't public. And. I saw other people on the team, you know, in the high eighties, and I was like, wow, this is wild.
[00:18:48] And I sort of gave myself all the excuses. I can't do that because marketing's going through really hard changes that aren't public or we're having really difficult conversations with other departments that we need to [00:19:00] figure out. and then at some point the competitive. A bell went off in my head and I was like, we're gonna make it, we're gonna make a change.
[00:19:08] So I first, I put a daily tracker in place for me. So every day I would get updated on what percentage of my slacks were public versus private. And I had a goal in mind. And secondly, I sort of announced to the team, I said, Hey, I'm gonna do my best to work in public. If you see me pushing one one to one dms in public, there's, that's, that's why.
[00:19:27] and so over the course of three months, I went from about 50% private. To 4% private. So last month I was 96% working in public.
[00:19:37] Mike Kaput: Wow.
[00:19:38] Dan Slagen: and I think I was number one on the exec team. I think I was number two in the whole company. and so. That's a huge, huge shift just doing that. first of all, I still get a lot of one, one-to-one dms from people, right?
[00:19:51] You have people that saw my announcement and I had people that fully supported me, and then I had people that were stubborn, or people that just weren't used to that type of change. It's a radical way of [00:20:00] changing the way that you work, and so every time I would get something, I would think. Can we push this to public?
[00:20:04] Or someone asked me for a one-to-one, I'd say, well, what exactly do you wanna talk about? You know, I think you can actually go talk about this in that channel, or, or that kind of thing. And you know, we also had some conversations that I've never had in public before either that we were sort of testing what an organization can handle.
[00:20:20] Talking about if a certain person is, is good for a role or not, and having that person there talking about it in public and not everyone's comfortable with that kind of stuff. You could very quickly see what, what was gonna work and what was not gonna work. But my overwhelming takeaway was working in public.
[00:20:37] Is a lot less scary than it sounds and it's a lot less big brother-ish than it sounds. And actually most things can and should live out in public. The last thing I'll say, sorry, is I was very much against this concept when I joined Zapier. Zapier has a very unique culture and work culture. You guys have probably seen that, everything from the AI fluency to everything else, but I did not like, I don't wanna change the way I [00:21:00] work and I don't wanna work on the open.
[00:21:01] Like I didn't like it and now I. It would be tough to go back.
[00:21:06] Mike Kaput: That's incredible. I love the behavioral side of this. I feel like it's so under-discussed, like how we are changing, interacting with these machines. So I'm kind of curious, like I realize there's only so much you can talk about publicly in terms of how this is built, how it works, but just maybe connect a few dots for me at whatever level you can discuss publicly.
[00:21:25] Mike Kaput: Like how, so it sounds like Slack information publicly is a key. Part of the data that feeds into this marketing brain. Yeah. Maybe kind of just gimme a sense of what tools or technologies, I mean, are powering this. What models is it? How much of it is Zapier native versus other tools?
[00:21:42] Dan Slagen: Yeah, so it's living, it's living and breathing in Zapier.
[00:21:45] Okay. We announced a beta a couple of months ago, but it's living there. But you know, all the tools, all the LM tools are, are powering it. So, you know, people are using their, cursor or codex or, or cloud, whatever. That's, that's part of it. The surface [00:22:00] areas are, are really important in terms of what we can suck up.
[00:22:02] Mm-hmm. So granola notes are really important. Zoom call transcripts. We still use, you know, we use Google Docs, we use Coda, any of those types of things, it will pull up. But it's really great because then at the end of the week, you know, even for something as simple as me sending out like the what's top of mind for Dan Ev, you know, every Friday, which I do, it's able to just pull from all of those sources at once and very quickly surface up what happened this week, what's most important, what worked really well, what's not working well.
[00:22:30] And then as we start to go public with campaigns, you can start to look at all the different channels and just see. Okay, where, where did the brain miss? Where are we, where do we need to improve it? Where did an input get dropped down? Because when we really started to get into the concept, at first it sounded very easy to build.
[00:22:46] And the person that came up with this notion of lossless marketing or generational loss, this guy Joe on, on the team, and he is a fairly technical product marketing background and has now moved into a, a agentic marketing [00:23:00] role for us. Okay. But when we first started talking with him. This didn't sound so hard.
[00:23:05] And then you get down to the individual tools that every single person is using the way that every single person works, and you're like, oh, okay. This is, this is gonna be a lot. But you just kind of check it off one person at a time and each team has their own goals that are loaded into it. And you just, you just start to get the brain working as, as a muscle, like any other new muscle that your team built.
[00:23:25] Mike Kaput: That's awesome. So if I, and you know, again, we don't have to get too in the weeds on it, but I am curious if I'm your average marketer at Zapier, it sounds like regardless of what tool I'm using, whether it's Cursor, codex, et cetera, it also to some degree has a connection to this central marketing brain that is then able to assist me in my use cases and the things I'm building.
[00:23:46] Is that correct?
[00:23:47] Dan Slagen: Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. And the idea here is that, you know, every time you wanna start a new campaign or something, you don't have to go rewrite the brief. You don't have to go think about, okay, so where are we starting from? What's the latest? It's just, you just have the [00:24:00] context and you just go,
[00:24:01] Mike Kaput: that's awesome.
[00:24:01] Okay. So, you know, as you're talking through this, it strikes me, not only is this. beast to kind of build, but also presumably to maintain. How are you all thinking about making sure it's up to date? Obviously Slack is auto pulled in, docs are auto pulled in, but what about kind of the logic behind it, the goals, the strategy?
[00:24:22] How are you thinking about all that?
[00:24:23] Dan Slagen: we talk a lot about AI and agents, so let me shift over to human for a minute. I am of the full belief that for Zapier. Full, at least one FTE on marketing, is totally worth it. So for the most part, the person Joe, I mentioned, he, he owns the maintenance of, of the brand.
[00:24:43] Okay. and again, he was, you know, someone that has a technical background, product, marketing background, understands the company. He's been at Zapier for a really long time. That helps. He just has the natural context over the past couple years. but none of this would work without the maintenance piece.[00:25:00]
[00:25:00] And I'll also say what worries me is long-term adoption. The cursor. Code Red worked probably more out of fear than inspiration. Yeah. I don't, I don't love, I don't love that that was the case, but that's probably what the case was. And maybe some of it was because I, you know, I was new, I took over as a team lead.
[00:25:21] People don't wanna want, don't want me to think that they're not adopting, you know, the thing I want them to adopt. Maybe some of it was people did really get scared about their careers falling behind if they didn't keep up with it. But I, it was probably more based on that to start and it ended up with inspiration.
[00:25:36] The brain. I want people, I want it to be the opposite. I want people to really have the value and say, I couldn't imagine working without this. I love that we have access to this and it helps me go a lot faster. It has already, and it, you can already start to see it. Like our brand team was not talking enough to our product marketing team.
[00:25:55] Okay. You would see things where a brand concept might be loosely related to the things [00:26:00] going on in product marketing, but the brand team can't keep up with all the conversations product marketing is having with the build organization and the product teams every single day. And so being able to speed that knowledge loop up, where when the brand team is starting to think about something, they're very.
[00:26:15] They can easily see what the latest and greatest is, and they know exactly which teams to go back and ask for, like what inputs they need to go into the next brand campaign. Like that's already been something that I've seen. It seems like there's been a new bridge that's been created between those two teams.
[00:26:29] That's been pretty exciting.
[00:26:31] Mike Kaput: You touched on a couple things I'd like to dive a little deeper on. First is those benefits. You said, you know, closing knowledge loops faster. What are some other clear impacts you're seeing from both the team adopting more AI builder tools, but also generally the development of the marketing brain?
[00:26:49] Dan Slagen: we are constantly looking at new tools to develop, and, and onboard every time we do it. There's always that. Phase, [00:27:00] the early phase. It's like the honeymoon phase of a new tool or something that you're using where you accept things that you probably wouldn't accept once the honeymoon phase is over.
[00:27:08] And it's, it all sort of comes down to AI slop in some way, shape, or form. And when the slop is internal, it's one thing; it's not great, but when it's external, it's a lot worse. Although we also just put out, a company mandate recently on internal AI slop. And just holding a new bar for it. Because again, we're starting to use more of the tools and you're gonna see that stuff break, but it's something we have to pay attention to.
[00:27:31] but I will say that having those types of agents or tools or vendors pull from a central location has been really, really nice. It has not erased AI slop completely, but it has significantly decreased the amount that I would've seen, you know, six months ago or something like that.
[00:27:49] Mike Kaput: So, because you have much better access to highly personalized information, contextual to the organization, you're cutting out a lot of the typical generic [00:28:00] lazier outputs you might get from these tools otherwise.
[00:28:03] Dan Slagen: Exactly. And yes, and it's, it's a couple ways. One, it has a latest and greatest on what the product vision is and the current thinking around that. Two, it just has access to so much more context. So for instance, if we're onboarding, you know, a new. Outreach tool or something like that. And we're gonna be sending messages through, you know, certain people in the organization.
[00:28:24] It can so easily see how that person talks, how that person writes the voice of that individual as opposed to making up something. and so, yeah, I feel like what's been nice is that the output is more accurate of the people and the message is more accurate of the current state of the product vision.
[00:28:43] Mike Kaput: Gotcha.
[00:28:43] Dan Slagen: You know, and it's to the point now where, you know. Every morning now when I come in, you know, not only is like my slack and everything recapped, but the emails that came into me like it, I already have drafts like auto, auto created when I come in in the morning.
[00:28:59] Mike Kaput: [00:29:00] That's
[00:29:00] Dan Slagen: awesome. You know, and I find myself having to edit them a lot less.
[00:29:04] I'm, I'm certainly not, certainly not comfortable having an auto reply, but auto draft is, has gotten a lot better.
[00:29:10] Mike Kaput: That's incredible to hear those specifics because it sounds almost like you're moving towards this vision where like, I mean, we're talking about a central brain. AI is essentially helping in one way or another, run the company, allocate resources, prepare you to do your best work every
[00:29:29] Dan Slagen: day.
[00:29:29] Yeah, and I will say, because I know people are thinking this. All of the stuff that's getting automated and all the stuff, the brain is working.
[00:29:35] Mike Kaput: Yeah.
[00:29:36] Dan Slagen: I'm so excited for the people that currently do that work to be able to get a level up.
[00:29:40] Mike Kaput: Hmm.
[00:29:41] Dan Slagen: And it's not, they're not, I don't want them to go up this level of like Lala strategy land where they're not doing anything.
[00:29:47] They're gonna be able to move into that really nice, magical moment where you run strategy and impact at the same time and you're still doing stuff. It's the player coach combination. It's like those point, those points in your [00:30:00] career where you're just like. Ah, man, I had it good for those two years, you know, and like, I feel like more of that is going to, is that's where I'm starting to be able to see being able to put people, across all different forms of marketing.
[00:30:11] I'm seeing it with the brand folks and with the demand folks, product marketing, there's just so many things where I'm like, oh, I'm so excited for the next version of your role. That person I talked about earlier, who runs our, our customer marketing, the things that they've been able to build and the way they're operating, it just, and it's just fun.
[00:30:26] And they never would've been able to do it without these types of systems.
[00:30:30] Mike Kaput: So you also alluded to some of the challenges here. I'm curious where you've seen this get a little harder or messier than maybe you would've expected or anticipated.
[00:30:42] Dan Slagen: Yeah, a couple ways. One, people might not like it. Yeah. A new way is a new way of working.
[00:30:48] I think Zapier is very much ahead of the curve. I feel like we sort of. We, we, we work in the future, in the present. That's kind of just the way that the company operates. and so every time one of these new [00:31:00] phases comes out, you know, the messaging is, is pretty clear to the whole organization. You may not like the way that.
[00:31:06] Work is changing and that that's, that's okay. at Zapier. That's all right. If the, if you, if you don't love it, this doesn't have to be for everyone, but there's definitely been some of that where, you know, behavioral change is hard. People still fall on the old habits that got them to the point in their career that they're at, and so having to manage some of that has, has been big.
[00:31:24] two would just be trying to keep all of it together. I mean, there's so many moving parts, like when you're trying to build the brain. How do you get it out to the whole team at once? How do you make like monitor who's doing it, who's not? Who's in charge of adoption if someone's using it or not using it?
[00:31:41] How do we think about that? Who's responsible with the success of that? Is it you know, the person that built the brain or is it each individual team manager? And so having to talk through while those types of scenarios, I feel like all the challenges to me. Have been much more on how are humans going to work in this new world, [00:32:00] versus, ah, we couldn't, we couldn't pull, make that technical part work.
[00:32:03] We couldn't pull content from this source. That stuff's all been been solvable. it's much more been the organizational stuff.
[00:32:11] Mike Kaput: So Dan, as we kinda wrap up our conversation here, to that point you just made, I'm curious for leaders who are listening who want AI to change how their organizations actually work, you guys are.
[00:32:24] Much further ahead than most. what advice would you have for someone who's maybe a few steps or many, many steps behind where you're at today?
[00:32:34] Dan Slagen: Wherever you are at, there's a next goal that you're trying to reach. And I think the thing that hinders you reaching that goal more than anything else is you're worried that the team doesn't have time for it, because you have to get.
[00:32:46] That marketing campaign out, you have to hit the pipeline goal this month. You have to get the brand campaign out, whatever it might be. And you feel like if you add another layer of, Hey, I need you guys to also pay attention to this, the team's just gonna ignore you or it's gonna pull them away. And [00:33:00] I felt that a lot by the way.
[00:33:02] you have to fight through it.
[00:33:06] Mike Kaput: Yeah, finding the time for this stuff, it's just it. Does that come down to an individual commitment or hunger? Is that something you can kind of help with from the top? I'm always curious about that.
[00:33:17] Dan Slagen: I've tried to build the frameworks for the team, some more detailed than others, and when I'm asking people to do new things, I've also asked them to work in a different way.
[00:33:29] And so if I need to give them, you know, a little bit more time to get the deliverable, 'cause I know they're gonna be working in a new way, that's okay if the deliverable comes in a little bit more raw or it's not perfect, but they were able to build it with a new system, that's okay. I've given people sort of the comfort, not quite to fail, but you know, often people want this perfectly buttoned up thing that they deliver to you.
[00:33:52] It's like, you don't have to worry about that. Let's just get going. Get the system built and we'll, we'll, we'll get better from there. So I think [00:34:00] maybe trying to take some of the pressure off people, that it doesn't have to be perfect as they're learning has been helpful as well.
[00:34:05] Mike Kaput: That's awesome, Dan, I could talk about this for hours.
[00:34:09] This is fantastic. We really appreciate you coming on the show and detailing everything for us here. I've learned a ton already and it feels like not enough time to pick your brain about all this stuff and pick your brain about the marketing brain, but. We really appreciate having you. We appreciate everyone tuning in for this special episode.
[00:34:28] We're gonna do several more of these in partnership with Google Cloud. A big shout out to Google Cloud for being such a great partner and helping us get these transformation stories out in the wild. Until next time, we'll see you all later. And Dan, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to our AI transformation series from the Artificial Intelligence Show.
[00:34:48] To keep learning, visit SmarterX.AI where you'll find on-demand courses, upcoming classes, and practical resources to guide your AI [00:35:00] journey.