How Ethan Schwandt helped Jobber turn AI adoption into a building culture

When companies talk about AI transformation, they often start with what they rolled out: the model, the license, the training program, or the pilot.

Ethan Schwandt started somewhere more useful: the work.

As Senior Manager, Talent Acceleration at Jobber, Ethan helped employees recognize where AI and automation could remove a recurring handoff, reduce manual work, or make information easier to act on. He paired that opportunity-spotting with practical enablement, clear governance, and hands-on support.

Making enablement stick

Ethan started his enablement work from the top and built the enablement system around the adoption: a leadership hackathon for 55 directors, a hands-on session with 161 employees, office hours on building and governance, curated learning resources, and AI integrated into Jobber’s onboarding.

The goal was to help people move from curiosity to building something useful within the same week, with guardrails in place to keep building safe. That’s what helped the capability spread across teams rather than remain dependent on one specialist.

That collective approach paid off. During the initial adoption push, Jobber’s active Zapier builder population grew 122% in the first 30 days. By summer, Jobberinos were running hundreds of active workflows across the calendars, spreadsheets, communication, CRM, and project-management tools their teams used daily.

That growth is also showing up in the team’s technical fluency: employees are moving beyond basic workflow building into Code by Zapier and MCP, with several now writing code directly inside their Zaps. 

AI transformation takes hold across departments

The numbers describe more than a successful rollout. They show people in different parts of Jobber using automation and AI to change work they already understand. Jobber’s active workflows connected 28 business-system apps, including Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Slack, HubSpot, Gmail, Salesforce, Intercom, NetSuite, Asana, Ashby, Livestorm, Tableau, Typeform, and Zoom. Jobber’s teams are also using Zapier MCP across 20 apps, showing how far beyond a few isolated workflows the capability has spread.

Katy Kowalczuk’s onboarding team offers a useful example. The team connects Livestorm registration data to a live sheet, uses that information to generate presentation materials in Claude, and sends the output to Slack. A separate workflow tracks attendance and summarizes chat feedback. Instead of pulling together manual recaps, the team can spend more time facilitating sessions, coaching customers, and giving leadership a clearer view of what is happening.

That is the practical outcome Ethan was working toward, and it's why he's the 2026 Zappy AI Transformation Leader of the Year. 

Jobber had already given employees access to Zapier, but access alone didn’t change how people worked. Ethan helped create the conditions for people to move from curiosity to building: a leadership hackathon, hands-on enablement, office hours, curated learning resources, team rituals, and governance that enabled responsible building.

The result is visible in the work itself. People across IT, Talent, People Ops, Marketing, Events, Sales, and Engineering are building. The company no longer needs to rely on one specialist to imagine every workflow or manage every improvement. The people closest to the work are empowered to make that work move. 

Ethan described the goal:

“I didn’t want to ship one workflow. I wanted to build the conditions for the whole company to build something that genuinely changed how they worked.”

His work helped Jobber turn AI and automation from a collection of experiments into a capability that other people can use, extend, and make their own.