https://zapier.com/blog A blog about productivity, workflow automation, company building and how to get things done with less work. Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:13:58 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/minimize-ai-spend You ever watch a hot dog eating contest? It's impressive to see someone wolf down five franks per minute, but you just know the stomach pains are coming. This is the image that comes to mind when I hear about companies tracking how many AI tokens their employees consume, to make sure they're using AI "enough." And even without this kind of performative AI theater, your monthly AI bill might be giving you Joey Chestnut levels of indigestion. If your AI token spend costs more than whatever amount Steph Spector Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/minimize-ai-spend https://zapier.com/blog/brighthire-zapier-integration An interview isn't one task. Now that BrightHire connects with Zapier, teams can automate more of the work around it. Before an interview starts, the team needs the right candidate, position, and schedule records in place. After it ends, the team needs the notes, transcript, summary, tasks, and updates to reach the tools where decisions happen. BrightHire captures the interview intelligence: recordings, transcripts, notes, questions, and conversation analytics. With the new BrightHire integratio Joe Stych Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/brighthire-zapier-integration https://zapier.com/blog/automate-employee-onboarding-offboarding Too busy onboarding and offboarding employees to focus on other business-critical processes? Whether you're in HR or IT, it's your job to make sure new employees have the tools they need to kickstart their careers—and to wrap up when they leave.  But doing that (on top of your other priority work) can quickly become overwhelming if you're handling these processes manually.  With just a few Zap workflows—what we call automations—you can send team notifications about new employees, assign onboardi Allisa Boulette Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-employee-onboarding-offboarding https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-pricing When evaluating software, pricing is about more than the dollar amount: it's about the return on your investment. One business might fixate on price-per-task, while another might care more about speed to market, reliability, or the ability to scale without hiring. Neither is wrong. But the tools that deliver real business value—consistently, predictably, and at scale—tend to pay for themselves quickly. Zapier is one of those tools. With transparent pricing, powerful built-in features, and the ab Nicole Replogle Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-pricing https://zapier.com/blog/what-is-a-task-in-zapier When my husband and I say we're running to the pet store for "a few things," we both know that's hilariously optimistic. We might go in planning to pick up kibble and maybe refill the treat jar, but there's no way we can resist maxing out our budget on dog toys once we're there. "A few things" doesn't actually tell you much about what's happening. Automation tools can be the same way. They all talk about "tasks" (or executions, or runs, or activities, the list goes on), but if you don't know wha Nicole Replogle Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/what-is-a-task-in-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/zappy-award-monthly-winners-may-2026 We launched the Zappy Awards in May to find the builders quietly redesigning how work gets done at their companies. We're on the hunt for the people who see a problem, pick up Zapier, and do something about it. We've hit 50 submissions. We weren't expecting the bar to be this high this fast. So we've decided to move up our first monthly wins to start right now! These are the first two monthly winners. Rachael Silvano, Community Strategy Lead at Articulate Rachael manages E-Learning Heroes, a co Rob Ayre Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/zappy-award-monthly-winners-may-2026 https://zapier.com/blog/data-enrichment-tools I've spent a lot of time doing cold outreach, and nothing feels worse than finding your One True Lead and not being able to contact them. Maybe you have a first and last name but no email address, or maybe you have four bad phone numbers that all go straight to voicemail. The end result is the same: your outreach ends before it even starts. It's a common problem, and one that eats up hours that would be better spent doing literally anything else.  Crawling the web manually for valid contact info Dylan Reber Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/data-enrichment-tools https://zapier.com/blog/dropped-leads-survey If you're a sales manager, you probably know what tools you're supposed to give your team: a CRM, well-crafted follow-up sequences, and maybe a few AI agents running in the background. But chances are you're still one of the 92% of sales leaders who say their teams lose qualified leads every month because follow-ups are delayed, inconsistent, or forgotten entirely. If you have the tools, but not the results, you know something's broken. To find out what's blocking teams, we surveyed over 400 B2 Lane Gillespie Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/dropped-leads-survey https://zapier.com/blog/ai-in-the-workplace I'm not ruling out a future where the Terminator walks through the office doors and asks where he can find me. But until then, AI in the workplace doesn't have to be scary. In reality, it falls more on the spectrum from helpful to overhyped—and the trick is to calibrate accordingly. There are a lot of ways to use AI at work. Maybe Granola writes your meeting recaps, or you embed a chatbot into your website to answer customer questions. Or maybe you use MCP to have ChatGPT or Cursor take actions Nicole Replogle Mon, 15 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-in-the-workplace https://zapier.com/blog/claude-mythos On April 7, 2026, Claude Mythos Preview was officially announced, but it was apparently too dangerous to release. According to Anthropic, Claude Mythos represented a unique cybersecurity threat (they claimed that "the fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe.") Instead of releasing Mythos to the general public, they spun up Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative that also involved some big-name companies. The idea was that they'd be able to deploy Mythos Harry Guinness Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/claude-mythos https://zapier.com/blog/claude-ai I've been using Claude long enough to remember when the main selling point was that it was a nicer chatbot to talk to than the alternatives. (That's still true, for what it's worth.) But Claude no longer just talks to you about your work; it also does your work for you. You can give Claude a project, head off to make a coffee, and check in occasionally when questions pop up. For enterprises looking to get real productivity gains from AI, Claude has become the default choice. And Claude is equall Ryan Kane Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/claude-ai https://zapier.com/blog/calendly-vs-google-calendar Here's Google's simple (but powerful) software playbook: find products people like, make a Google-ized copy, and give it away for free. Love Dropbox and Zoom? Google Drive and Google Meet are solid substitutes, and you won't pay a thing. Calendly is the next app on Google's radar. Google Calendar's appointment scheduling feature, which started off as a barebones alternative, has gotten better over time. It's not as powerful as Calendly, but it's a reliable way for Google users to create booking Katie Paterson Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/calendly-vs-google-calendar https://zapier.com/blog/generative-ai If you've tried ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Nano Banana, Grok, or any other AI chatbot or image generator, you've used generative AI (also called GenAI). Over the past few years, huge developments in generative AI and computing power have taken these kinds of tools out of research labs and made them a practical part of everyday life. You've almost definitely used generative AI, but let's dig a little deeper and add some more context. Table of contents: What is generative AI? How does generative Harry Guinness Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/generative-ai https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-website-builder Building a website is no longer a particularly hard task—but it can be an annoying one. If you look at most sites, there's a fair amount of text, images, and general organization to it all. Even with the best tools, it takes a few hours to put together something good. Wouldn't it be great if you could just create a website from scratch in just a few minutes? That's what AI website builders claim to do.  The idea is that by using artificial intelligence, AI website builders can streamline everyth Harry Guinness Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-website-builder https://zapier.com/blog/ai-governance-tools I'll never forget the first time my childhood dog betrayed me. Before the incident, she was completely fine alone, knew every trick in the book, and only barked at the mailman and other potential serial killers.  Then came that fateful night. I left for two hours, returning to shredded magazines, ripped couch cushions, destroyed dog toys, and a wagging tail. Let my canine misfortunes be a lesson for your AI endeavors. AI can be useful, fully functional, and your best friend—until the day it isn' Ben Lyso Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-governance-tools https://zapier.com/blog/google-sheets-pivot-table Spreadsheets offer powerful analysis capabilities, but sometimes it feels like they're missing that extra layer of insight. When there's a massive amount of data, it's tough to summarize or draw conclusions from a basic spreadsheet view. That's where pivot tables come in. Most Excel power users use pivot tables as their bread and butter. But you can also use pivot tables in Google Sheets. Here, I'll walk you through how to create and use pivot tables in Google Sheets. Table of contents: What is Jessica Lau Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-sheets-pivot-table https://zapier.com/blog/automate-claude Claude has staked its claim in the AI landscape and keeps drawing in new users all the time with its standout writing, knack for coding, and all the hullabaloo around Mythos—its powerful new model class, now temporarily offline. There's power in a quick, off-the-cuff prompt to Claude, especially if it's a good prompt. But you can accomplish a lot more when you use Zapier to connect Claude to the rest of your apps and let automation carry out entire workflows for you. Ready to try it? Then keep s Steph Spector Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-claude https://zapier.com/blog/automate-facebook-conversion-api-with-zapier You search for trail running shoes once, and suddenly they're everywhere—your feed, your apps, even your email. Spooky? Maybe. But for marketers, that's just smart data at work. But the real magic happens when you close the loop between customer actions and your ad strategy. Every purchase, sign-up, or webinar registration is a signal, and feeding those signals back into Meta helps you double down on what's working and cut what isn't. The catch? Doing this manually across tools is a nightmare. T Elena Alston Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-facebook-conversion-api-with-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/gourmet-ads-mcp Benjamin Christie runs Gourmet Ads, a digital advertising business that helps food brands reach household grocery buyers and home cooks online. The company has been around for 18 years. Its advertising customers include supermarkets, food and beverage brands, and global advertising agencies. The engineering and product teams are small, which means every operational idea competes with product work, client work, reporting work, and the thousand small jobs that come with running an established adve Rob Ayre Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/gourmet-ads-mcp https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier New AI models launch practically every week, and keeping up with which ones to use for specific workflows is a job in itself. Consider this article your living reference. At Zapier, we run every model through AutomationBench. It's our benchmark for testing how well models carry out multi-step workflows, not just static prompts. Below, I'll walk through every major AI provider available on Zapier, the models you can plug into your Zap workflows today, and what each one is best for based on Zapier Steph Spector Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/hire-adrian-mcp Adrian Martinez runs a digital marketing agency in Toronto focused on Website Design, SEO, and answer engine optimization (AEO). He and his wife deliver for about twelve clients today. The constraint is time. Each account takes 10 to fifteen hours a month in hands-on work: research, drafts, technical SEO, and reporting. That math caps growth before it caps ambition. Adrian's bet isn't to hire a dozen account managers first. It is to build a delivery engine that maintains high quality while the t Rob Ayre Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/hire-adrian-mcp https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-marketing-tools Marketers wear all the hats. No matter what part of marketing you work in, it's likely you're asked to stretch your skills into another area. But with more and more AI marketing tools being released every day, it's made this multi-jobbing a lot easier.  The problem is, marketers are drowning in these AI tools. Every app has a copilot, every copilot has a price tag, and the line between "useful" and "expensive novelty" keeps moving. I've spent a lot of time tinkering with these tools. Based on th Juliet John Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-marketing-tools https://zapier.com/blog/docusign-alternatives Contracts, agreements, and other business documents going paperless hasn't meant the end of paperwork—it just means you need to sign things in a different way. You no longer need to find a pen, scrawl your name a few times on a scrap of paper, and send it off with a courier (or hand it to an admin to scan). In most cases, all you need to do is type your name, click a box, or use your laptop's trackpad. And, most importantly, it's just as legally binding.  Whether you're the one sending documents Harry Guinness Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/docusign-alternatives https://zapier.com/blog/tidycal-vs-calendly In the dark ages of scheduling meetings—a mere decade ago—back-and-forth emails were the standard. Then Calendly came along with its "smart scheduling" technology, which blocks out the times you aren't available and lets meeting attendees book whatever time works for them. Over time, it inspired legions of competitors. TidyCal is one of them, offering fewer features but significant cost savings. I'm a long-time Calendly user, and I spent time in TidyCal to compare the strengths of each tool. If Ryan Kane Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/tidycal-vs-calendly https://zapier.com/blog/make-integrations I have a particular brand of curiosity that kicks in the moment I find out another tool does roughly what the one I'm using does, possibly for less money, possibly with more features. It's a fun and emotionally healthy way to spend an afternoon—hunched over my laptop like a gargoyle trying to figure out whether I'm about to save money or accidentally volunteer myself for a part-time job maintaining workflows. That's usually the rabbit hole Make sends people down. On paper, it sounds compelling: Sunny Yadav Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/make-integrations