AI at Zapier: How we use artificial intelligence to streamline work

At Zapier, we're all about accelerating the work that matters most. That means leveraging technology—especially automation—to help us get there. 

But now we have a new co-worker in our midst: AI. 

Artificial intelligence is changing how we create things. From engineering to email ops and beyond, people everywhere are uncovering new use cases that are proving more and more disruptive—and have the power to change the way we work forever. 

But that doesn't have to be scary! Everyone can put AI to work, even if they're just starting out. To show you we practice what we preach, we reached out to different departments at Zapier to learn how our very own are leveraging AI to streamline their work. 

Here are some of the top ways we're embracing and experimenting with AI—which you can be a part of, too. 

Table of contents

• Sales and customer success operations

• Onboarding and HR

• Technical support operations 

• Content and video 

• PR and social media

• Engineering

• Accounting

• Revenue operations

Sales and customer success operations

Carrying out customer calls helps both our sales ops and customer success teams get a detailed glimpse into the customer journey, see what's working, and better understand what Zapier users need. 

And now, thanks to AI, we can streamline this process from start to finish. Here's how:

One workflow allows team members to reduce the prep time before customer calls in Gong by having AI look at a record or deal in HubSpot, gather information about the company, come up with any automation challenges they may be experiencing, then share it with the right person in Slack. 

Another AI workflow pulls recordings of customer calls from the sales CRM, summarizes each call with a quick overview, then posts it in Slack, so the team can learn from the interactions. 

That includes using AI to analyze and share customer sentiments, giving us a comprehensive view of a customer's interaction with the platform so we can help improve our product. 

Onboarding and HR

When it comes to sending out forms and surveys, our HR team deals with their fair share. There's a lot of ground to cover, from surveys that cover onboarding experiences to general employment feedback forms and retreat assessment surveys.  

That's why our onboarding team uses AI to help them collect and analyze sentiment ratings (positive, neutral, or negative) for every response received. It's a great way to save valuable time trying to understand the overall sentiment towards survey topics, so nothing ever falls through the cracks.  

Technical support operations 

Effective escalation management (dealing with technical incidents) is a pretty important piece of the puzzle when it comes to ensuring customer satisfaction, on top of managing a support team's regular workload. At Zapier, AI helps streamline some of these processes. 

One team member built a ChatGPT-powered bot and pulled it into a Slack support channel. It helps them troubleshoot issues with Zaps, get automation ideas, and learn how to use Zapier features more quickly. 

Another workflow involves using AI to create a formatted daily summary of all the previous day's activities in Slack. This includes all the escalated tickets and issues resolved and discussed for visibility, helping enhance team communication. 

Another nimble workflow that saves time? Creating the copy for status page updates based on templates and rules provided by the team. With the Zap below, whenever the support team specialists submit an entry in Typeform that describes an issue, ChatGPT will create a status page message and send it to Slack for approval. Then a webhook sends the approved message as a new update on Zapier's status page. Job done. 

Content and video  

We're big fans of AI on the content team. Whether it's using AI to summarize articles, create blog outlines, or write meta descriptions, it's proven to be pretty effective. 

For the most part, a lot of our writers' time is spent researching articles for this very blog. This workflow that has AI read and analyze articles before summarizing the key points and takeaways has proven pretty helpful for the team. 

On the editorial side, the whole team can save a lot of back and forth when providing feedback on first drafts. That's because writers can use the editorial bots the team created using Zapier interfaces and ChatGPT. From adding in a touch of humor to making first introductions more concise, these bots are a handy tool that saves time (and even helps us writers learn a thing or two). 

One of the best ways the video team leverages AI is to write rough scripts for YouTube based on article outlines they source from the blog team. Although not used as a final product, the team is sent the scripts in Slack and gets to review and refine them from there. 

Another handy way of leveraging AI to write content? The partnerships team built a workflow that watches for any changes external developers make to their integrations, then uses AI to rewrite the updates according to Zapier's style guide. Then we review and publish them inside our release notes!  

PR and social media

The PR team writes a lot of press releases. They're often quite templated, too, so it makes sense that AI can lighten the load. Their workflow takes basic information (like event details, company information, quotes, and key points), and turns it into a coherent and professionally styled press release, according to the rules they give the PR bot. That way, they can spend less time editing a mostly put-together piece rather than writing similar pieces from scratch over and over.

They've also created a range of other bots that employees can use to generate employee feedback with suggestions for improvement, strengths and weaknesses, and an overall evaluation. The way it works is simple: AI analyzes a piece of work (like a doc or a design) and generates constructive feedback based on predefined criteria and patterns. 

The social media team, on the other hand, uses a range of bots to automate various tasks on social media platforms. From posting content to responding to comments and messages to liking and sharing posts (and even following users), these bots can post content at optimal times for engagement and analyze data to understand trends and user behavior. 

Engineering  

The engineering team at Zapier deals with a lot of Jira and Zendesk tickets for product-related tasks and sprint planning. 

The incorporation of AI into their existing workflows has proven a game-changer. For example, the team built a workflow that summarizes Slack messages, transforms that summary into a Jira ticket, then adds it to the next planned sprint. 

When analyzing customer interactions and key performance indicators, the team also leverages a workflow that takes every message within a Zendesk ticket, uses AI to categorize the conversation, and adds all the metrics (like number of replies) to an existing Google Sheet for metrics tracking. 

Accounting

Our accounting department has to keep track of an incredible amount of tasks throughout the week, so they've incorporated AI into the project management flows to make things easier. A favorite: they use AI to pull a list of tasks in Slack, prioritizing them in order of importance, along with an estimated time slot to complete them. 

Although used for personal finances, this is an interesting one: One employee set up a workflow with AI that lets them keep track of all their credit card transactions. 

It works like this: Whenever a user receives an email alert about an expenditure, ChatGPT extracts relevant information (like vendor and amount), then categorizes it and adds it to a Google sheet for further analysis. Pretty neat if you like an informative overview of expenses. In a business context, this could do wonders for financial planning and tracking. 

Revenue operations

When it comes to creating personalized emails at scale, every email ops team knows how time-consuming they can be, what with the amount of logic and personalization tokens needed to build effective marketing messages. 

That's why the Revenue Ops team experimented with AI, as they realized that ChatGPT could generate dynamic copy in any format. For example, they created a workflow that automatically builds trial expiration emails (including the copy) that highlight specific Zapier features that are most relevant to the user. How? The workflow pulls in user information from their marketing automation system, saving a massive amount of time—no if/then logic required. 

The team also built a bot in Slack that answers common questions from internal sales reps about lead stages, lead definitions, and how certain sales processes work. This workflow uses Zapier internal documentation to answer questions, so all answers are as up to date and accurate as possible. 

Stay on top with AI and automation

By using any of these workflows, you'll be freeing up whole departments to focus on more creative and strategic work.  

From customer support to content creation and engineering, AI and automation combined is a game-changer, with the potential to save time and money, improve efficiency, and increase productivity.