How Viva is building an AI-first culture with automation

At Viva, executive assistants (EAs) are the stars of the show. The company hires, trains, and matches top-tier remote EAs with executives at fast-growing companies backed by VC firms like Sequoia, a16z, Insight, and Coatue. But internally, Viva had a challenge: How could they empower their own EAs to work smarter while scaling their impact across the company?

"Our mission is to create meaningful job opportunities for women across Latin America," says Dania Maduro, an Executive Assistant at Viva. "But we also want to support our go-to-market team with the same level of excellence we provide to customers."

As the Viva team swelled to 140 people, the demands on their internal EAs multiplied. Dania, who supports one of Viva's co-founders, realized that the key to scaling wasn't just hiring more people. It was helping her team—and herself—automate repetitive work with AI and unlock more time for strategic contributions.

That shift in thinking sparked a company-wide initiative led by Dania to prototype and share repeatable automated workflows using Zapier.

"We’re building a repository of AI-powered workflows our whole team can use," says Dania. "It’s about asking, 'What are we doing manually today that automation can solve tomorrow?'" 

The briefing generator that cuts writing time in half

Before automation, prepping for meetings was a time sink for Dania and her team. "A pre-meeting briefing (PMB) could take me anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the call," she says. Multiply that by the number of calls in a week—three to five on average—and the time adds up quickly.

To pick up the pace, Dania built a Zapier workflow that generates PMBs automatically. When a new Google Calendar event with external attendees is created, AI pulls relevant attendee details. Those details then flow into a templated Google Doc specially designed for meeting prep. At that point, AI fills in additional context about the lead's company—like its employee count or funding stage.

Dania now spends half the time she used to on PMBs—and she's confident about the accuracy and presentation of each one.

"It literally saves me 50% of the time," says Dania. "I just review and check for accuracy. The panic is gone."

An automatic primp and polish for EA resumes

Viva's EAs go through a customer readiness process, which includes reformatting their resumes into a polished, company-approved template. But as sales volumes increased, manually refreshing each resume became unsustainable.

"It was a good problem to have," Dania says. "But we needed to process these resumes quickly."

So she built another Zapier workflow. This one extracts key resume details using AI, transfers those details to a Google Sheet, and then automatically populates a custom resume template in Google Slides.

This clean, scalable system transforms raw resumes into spiffy ones in a fraction of the time.

"We can now handle the volume without sacrificing quality or speed," says Dania, "giving prospects total confidence that their EA match is tailored to what they need."

Drafting personalized follow-ups from customer transcripts

When customer success managers (CSMs) needed to send follow-ups after meetings, it was a slog to review each call transcript and then craft a tailored note. Even pasting the transcripts into ChatGPT for help created a logjam.

Dania spotted an opportunity for another Zap to save the day. She created a workflow that triggers whenever a new transcript for a CSM's call is created. At that point, AI generates a follow-up email, which includes action items for the assigned EA—ready for review within minutes.

"Now, instead of writing emails from scratch, our CSMs just review and personalize. It's a big lift off their plates."

A shift in mindset: AI and automation first

Beyond the individual time-saving workflows, Dania's proudest achievement is the cultural shift taking root at Viva. The goal isn't just to automate her own tasks. It's to transform productivity across the organization.

"When we approach problems at Viva, we think AI and automation first," she says. "Even if it takes a little time to build, the time savings later are worth it. We believe the future is EAs plus AI, and Zapier is the foundation for helping us get there."

That mindset has inspired a wave of creativity across the company. Team members who were less familiar with automation now pitch ideas, iterate on shared workflows, and grow increasingly comfortable with tools like Zapier, ChatGPT, and Claude.

"We started with a basic Google Sheets to Google Docs flow and asked, what else can we do with this? It turns out, a lot."

Viva is just getting started. Here's what Dania's roadmap for deeper automation and AI implementation includes: 

• More Slack-triggered Zaps (like adding people to meetings through emoji reactions)

• Using Zapier Tables to better manage data across systems

• Training teammates to self-serve using shared templates and workflows

With AI and automation in their toolkit, Dania and the team at Viva are proving that when you scale with intention, productivity follows.