Zapier Co-Founder on AI Agents and the Path to AGI | Mike Knoop
Plus how PMs and marketers can use AI to automate their jobs and what might get us to AGI (hint: it's not LLMs)
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Mike Knoop.
Mike co-founded Zapier and started the ARC Prize to accelerate progress towards AGI. We had a great chat about how PMs and marketers can use AI to automate their work, what Zapier’s “code red” moment was, and how he believes we can reach AGI (hint: it’s not LLMs).
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Mike and I talked about:
(00:00) The two types of AI automation
(01:57) How Zapier automation works
(05:14) I quit being Zapier's CPO to do AI research
(07:54) I gave employees a week off to just use AI
(11:57) How PMs can use AI agents to save time
(14:03) We saved $100K by using AI to automate marketing and sales
(21:28) Robotic process automation might be better than APIs
(26:30) Most definitions of AGI are wrong
(30:45) Why LLMs won't get us to AGI and what might work instead
Get the takeaways below.
Why Zapier went all in on AI
Welcome Mike! Can you share what Zapier does?
Sure! Zapier’s mission is to put automation in the hands of everyone, including non-technical folks. Most of our users are business people in marketing, sales, support, and product management.
Zaps is our bread and butter product to do this. They work like “if this happens, then do that.” For example, Zaps can automate drafting new emails in Gmail when you get a new Google Form sales lead.
When did you realize that Zapier needed to go all-in on AI?
I was running product and engineering at Zapier in January 2022, but it became clear that AI was making huge progression when research papers showed that AI’s accuracy was nearing 80%.
So I told my co-founder Wade: “Can you run all of Zapier because the most important thing for me to do right now is to become an AI researcher.”
For the next 6-12 months, Brian (CTO) and I wrote code and built prototypes with LLMs all day. We then became a top partner for OpenAI in building ChatGPT plugins and custom GPTs.
How did you encourage Zapier employees to adopt AI tools?
In March 2023 (after OpenAI’s GPT store launch), Wade, Brian, and I held an all-hands where we declared that AI was a “code red” moment for Zapier.
We then gave everyone a week off their day jobs with a mission to learn how to use AI tools.
Our internal AI adoption curve showed a steep slope during that week. Over 50% of our employees now use AI tools daily to do work faster.
Practical tips to automate product and marketing work with AI
Great, so let’s cover some practical use cases by job function. Let’s start with PMs and engineers — how can AI automation help them?
The most useful application we've found for LLMs is handling unstructured data.
LLMs are great at extracting insights and summarizing the takeaways from large amounts of raw text and data.
For example, our product team uses a Zap that:
Collects user feedback every 24 hours
Uses LLM to summarize and prioritize the issues
Pushes the prioritized list of issues into a Slack channel
This saves us so much time — it would have been super painful to do it manually.
That’s amazing. How can automation help sales and marketing folks?