Wade Foster

Co-founder and CEO of Zapier, the workflow-automation platform that connects web apps (now AI- and agent-driven). A self-described heavy AI user who runs an organisation of mixed human teams and bots.

Operating practices (from How AI Is Changing Communication (HBR IdeaCast))

• Executive sensing via agents — points an agent at Slack, email, meeting notes, project management, CRM and code to get company-wide summaries; treats them as "directionally correct" and verifies. #1 tip: connect your LLM to your organisation's real data. See Context Engineering.
• Accountability rule (quoting co-founder Brian): "You can delegate the work, but you can't delegate the accountability."
• Zapier's AI etiquette: author effort ≥ reader effort; label AI's role as author / co-author / assistant; bots carry bot avatars and never masquerade as people; agents posting on someone's behalf say so. See AI Communication Etiquette.
• "Wade bot" — voice-cloning writing skills trained on his corpus reach only 80–90% and need re-tuning each model release; finds newer models worse at communication even as they improve at coding. Deliberately rejects polish ("I have raw edges"); calls out "AI slop" and "Claudisms" in colleagues' writing. See Authenticity Crisis (AI Communication).
• Anti-sycophancy system prompts — instructs every model he uses to debate, critique and push back. See Productive Resistance.
• Bots with metrics — Zapier's customer-support bots have human-in-the-loop steps, per-step CSAT and internal evals; internal Slack bots are "vibe-based." Noted that bots get more candid feedback than humans do. See Multiplayer AI (Shared Agents).
• Voice-to-text changed how he speaks — he now pauses and composes full sentences first. See Voice-First Agent Interface.
• Human skills to protect: curiosity and judgment.

Appears on: HBR IdeaCast.