How I AI - How Zapier’s EA built an army of AI interns to automate meeting prep, strengthen team culture, and scale internal alignment | Cortney Hickey

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Cortney Hickey is the executive assistant to the CEO at Zapier, where she’s leveraging AI to transform traditional EA responsibilities into scalable, organization-wide systems. In this episode, she demonstrates how she’s built AI workflows that automate meeting preparation, reinforce company culture through automated feedback, and democratize strategic knowledge across the organization. Her approach shows how EAs can use AI not to replace their roles but to elevate them—working on higher-impact initiatives while creating systems that benefit the entire company.What you’ll learn:How to build an automated meeting prep system that researches participants, checks CRM data, and delivers actionable insights before important meetingsA framework for creating AI-powered culture reinforcement through automated meeting feedback aligned with company values and operating principlesHow to develop an AI-powered document review system that helps teams align with executive expectations before formal reviewsA strategy for creating a centralized knowledge base that makes company strategy accessible and interactive for all employeesWhy “progress over perfection” is the key mindset for building effective AI workflows that evolve over timeHow EAs can use AI automation to work themselves out of repetitive tasks and into higher-impact strategic roles—Brought to you by:WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready todayBrex—The intelligent finance platform built for founders—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Cortney(02:48) Overview of meeting prep automation with Zapier Agents(04:43) How the meeting prep agent works(10:21) An example of the meeting prep agent in practice(12:16) Creating a culture reinforcement system through meeting feedback(15:45) EAs’ unique position to leverage these tools(18:12) Building an automated meeting coach(24:03) Developing an executive document review system(33:15) Creating a centralized strategy companion in NotebookLM(36:18) How AI is transforming the EA role, not replacing it(40:00) Lightning round and final thoughts—Tools referenced:• Zapier: https://zapier.com/• Zapier Agents: https://zapier.com/agents• Todoist: https://todoist.com/• Slack: https://slack.com/• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/• Google NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/—Where to find Cortney Hickey:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cortneyhickey/—Where to find Claire Vo:ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/Website: https://clairevo.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/X: https://x.com/clairevo—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].

I think from EA's I hear like, oh, AI doesn't think the way I do. I'm like, it can though. And as long as you can figure out the system behind why you're doing things and be able to articulate that. I think this is going to be one of the most practical time saving and stress-saving episodes of how IAI we have ever have this agent does everything you want and then more. And over time, you can make it more intelligent. It's serving of this kind of second brain for me where, yes, I have all this in part. of my superpower as an EA is remembering all these things about people. But this is making sure that it's not all in my head and I can really refresh my memory quickly on all the context rather

than diving through the CRM, my email, Slack and looking at all these things separately. If you are doing a repeated task every week, spend time that week, automating that task. I definitely am a believer that AI can only enable us in this role. I think it's a when, not an if. We will have to be folks that adopt these tools. Welcome back to How IAI. I'm Clara Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today we have Courtney Hickey, EA to the CEO at Zapier. And yes, of course, she uses AI to automate all of the admin tasks related to meetings and document preps and feedback. But she's also going to show us some unique ways that you can use

AI to reinforce your cultural values and operating principles. This is a really really a really great one for anybody thinking about organization at scale, operations at scale, and culture at scale. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your co-pilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure

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I am really excited about this episode because I think this is going to be one of the most practical, time-saving, and stress-saving episodes of how AI we have ever had. So I'm just pumped to have you on. Can you just tell us a little bit about why you've chosen to dive headfirst into using AI in your role aside from the place that you work? Yeah. So I work for Zapier, which is an automation and AI orchestration company. So of course, it's part of our company, Ethos. But I am, I'm just personally super passionate about using AI because I think it can help work myself out of the boring, repetitive manual parts of my role so I can do more interesting work. And so I truly believe that it's not a if you have to use AI in this type of role.

It's a when. So I like to be ahead of the curve. I like to learn by doing. And so I've spent as much time as I can over the past couple of years really diving into this and seeing how I can change this. shape of my role with this new tech. And what I like is we're going to start off on a workflow and use case that I think everyone can relate to, which is meetings stink.

Or not meeting stink, but meetings could be better used in most organizations. They're expensive. You have a lot of people in them. And I think like prep and follow up are so valuable and aren't really done well by organization. So I'd love for you to walk us through a couple of your meeting related workflows. Totally. Yeah. I mean, as in EA, my life runs off of the calendar. So that was naturally one of the first place I dove into with AI. And so let's jump into one of my favorite workflows that I've built. And this is within Zapier agents. So our agent's product, within Zapier, we have a bunch

different products all the way from super deterministic automations that run the same way every time with little creativity to these agents that can do tasks that involve more reasoning and have a lot more freedom to operate. So you could build this in a zap, but I wanted to like paint the, you know, change the color of the sky with this agent for myself. So this is an example of one I use personally, but you can replicate this for anyone you work with. But this is a essentially my weekly meeting prep agent, which on Fridays I used to have maybe, let's say, two hours blocked 30 minutes to like do a retro on that week and anything I need to change, but then like spending an hour or so really diving into the next week and what I need to be prepared

for. So the way this agent works, and it's kind of developed over time, but it has a few steps it goes through. And the key thing is this is scheduled to trigger every week. I have it do it at Friday at 8 a.m. So you can have it whenever. And basically it goes through my calendar for the upcoming week. It identifies all meetings that require prep. So personally, I don't need to prep much for routine one-on-ones, a team stand-ups, or recurring internal meetings. But I do have more and more external meetings on my calendar now that I'm doing more out in the world with AI and automation and teaching folks how to do the same. So basically, I have it be a bit of a research buddy at first. So first it just pulls my calendar. Then it goes and does all of the research for me. So

this takes anyone without a Zapier email and does a web search basically. It researches their current role, their industry experience, anything, anything noteworthy that I might want to know about them. And then it does this cool thing, which also goes and checks in our CRM, which we use have a spot at Zapier, but you can put in any of our 8,000 integrations here and use your CRM. But for each external participant, it goes and then looks at what their relationship is with Zapier. So it looks at email address first, then my company name figures out if they're in a deal, if there's any recent sales team notes, if there's any interaction I should know of. And then it also goes and searches internal comms history. So within my Gmail to see our private prior relationship, if any,

within Slack to see if there's any callouts to their company. And so it's doing all these things that I would do manually. And then it's delivering me two outputs in the end. So one of them is tasks for my actual prep with all this in it. So I like it to create a task in to-doist, which is my to-do list app within a certain project of meeting prep. It pulls in all of this information with this intelligence from the agent and tells me to prep for it. It puts it on my calendar for two hours before the meeting start time. So you can see who that looks like in real life, you know, here. Here's a couple meetings I have next week and they're automatically queued in my to-doist. But the second thing it does is delivers this weekly digest to Slack. So this is,

and you could do this day by day too if you have a ton of meetings, but again, I'm mostly internal. So I have it create a structured digest, which includes all of the meetings and intelligence, any error handling I might need to know, like if the agent couldn't find someone or if there's anywhere I should do a manual follow up. And then it does this like, it pulls its own, you It uses its own creativity to create these insights for me about what I should pay most attention to for this upcoming week. So I can pull up a real example here. So I just ran this this morning just for this example, but it's going looking at the next week. It's pulling all of the key meetings that require preparation.

It's saying, okay, so we have a team onboarding with fellow. We're changing our AI note-taking app. And so it did some intelligence on who we're meeting with for this. It's confirming that this is a new vendor relationship. We've previously purchased this meeting management. There are implementation specialist. And then, you know, here's more context on this. So it's like it's serving in this kind of second brain for me where, yes, I have all this.

And part of my superpower as an EA is remembering all these things about people. But this is making sure that I don't. it's not all in my head and I can really refresh my memory quickly on all the context rather than diving through the CRM, my email, Slack and looking at all these things separately. So one place is key. And then it pulls in this like key prep recommendations at the end, which is where the agent gets a little bit creative here. So it's saying I should review my previous carve session. This is a EA automation session I do every once in a while. It tells me to prepare some new demos, tell me to familiarize myself with fellow before the onboarding session and check with our head of

marketing for PR priorities before the agency call. So I love that it does exactly what I need to do. Like, you know, gives me all these preps in my to-doist and does those actions. But it also kind of serves as like a double check. Maybe there's something I haven't thought of. Maybe I didn't think I needed to update my deck and it gives me something new. So I think what's great about this agent is it does everything you want and then more. And over time, you can make it more intelligent. So as you learn how this works, and so I'll give you an example of how this actually works in reality. So this is the test that I pulled right before this call just to give us a clean Slack output. And it walks you through step by step what this agent was thinking. It's like, okay, I'm testing this.

I'm going to go look at the calendar. I'm going to go research all these participants. You can click in and see even more information about what it was thinking. You can see that it went in HubSpot, couldn't find someone for there, couldn't find someone. We probably didn't have a relationship with them. Oh, great. It found someone. And then it tells you everything it did. So over time, if something's not performing as you intended or you want to update it, you can really look at how this agent works on the back end and give it some feedback. And we have this great co-pilot where you can go in and say, you could say like, you could go into Copa and be like, oh, I actually would love to have a hyperlink to their LinkedIn page included in my to-doist things. You can say for each

participant, can you also add a LinkedIn hyperlink within the Slack Digest? So you can kind of, I always tell people when they're starting with an agent like this is progress over perfection. Like I started this one with just a quick digest. It didn't have our serum connected. It didn't have that. And then over time, I was like, oh, here's something else that might be helpful. And so, like, build something basic, see how it works, learn. And then, you know, make time to improve it over time so that you make sure it's really being impactful for you and doing all of the things it can.

And, you know, these tools are getting smarter every day. So also keep on top of, you know, the new, new capabilities. So you can start building those into agents and automations and things that you've built in the past. So that's a quick overview of the engine. Something I want to call out for folks is I think this workflow highlights a couple strategies that I think people will really need to think about. One is I tell people if you are doing a repeated task every week, spend. time that week automating that task.

And so I, when I had fancy jobs, had that an EA as well. We had a very similar process. We're on Fridays we would actually do a retro of the past week, prep for the next week, find out like all the stuff we needed to prep, make sure that I knew everything that needed to happen. And instead of spending that hour

doing that prep on a Friday, I highly recommend people just say, this week, I'm going to spend an hour automating. automated this into an agent and see if I can replace that flow. And so I think that's a really useful mindset to bring into what and when you can automate. Yeah. The second thing I would say is I love agents in particular, the sort of like natural language format of describing agents because you can literally just narrate what you would do. You would be like, first, I would go to Google and I would

look at all the meetings for the next week. And I would decide which ones I would. I need to prep for. Then I would go look at my email and see what the heck we're actually meeting about. Then I would dig through Slack. I would probably go look at HubSpot. And then I would, if I was doing a great job, organize it in this way, send it to myself in Slack as a reminder and create a bunch of to do's. Yeah.

You can actually use that natural language to describe an agent structure. And so I think it's a really natural way for people to get started designing some of these workflows. Yeah, I agree. Like I think of agents. When I first started using them, I kind of started thinking of them as interns almost. So they're not going to operate and do something completely independently from the start. But if you can teach the intern your system and how you think and give it the tools it needs, then over time your intern gets smart enough to run and do things on their own. And so, you know, this is something that now I rarely touch this agent because it works as I as I play. land consistently. You know, right now that was a good little ad that I just I just did for the LinkedIn profile so I can quickly add them. But, you know, there's there's not much else I have to do here.

And now I've given myself that time back. And even bigger, I can showcase this to everyone at Zapier, enable them with this template, which you can share. And then everyone can have this meeting prep agent. They can, you know, they can add different things if this isn't their exact workflow, like not everyone uses to-doist or, you know, not everyone. wants XYZ, but they can customize it for their own. And so I think it's like, yeah, teach, teach people how to fish and teach these interns your way of thinking, these agents. And over time,

you'll be surprised of how much you can do. I think from EA's I hear like, oh, you know, AI doesn't think the way I do. I'm like, it can though. Like, it can. As long as you can figure out the system behind why you're doing things and be able to articulate that. But yeah, I love the like, the dictate to co-pilot too because I do that. I'm like, okay, so usually I talk to it just like that, like as if I'm on a walk with a friend and see what it comes back with. And so, yeah, this is, this is like one of those things that's just a no-brainer to spend a little bit of time on and then just runs in the background. Yeah. And I think, you know, EA's in particular are so well positioned to make some of these tools for the broader organization because, you know,

you're a point of leverage in a team. And if you can systematize that leverage, I think two things happen. One, you can do a higher level job supporting your exact or your team. Two, everybody else gets a little bit of a boost that you wouldn't be able to personally give them. And so I think, you know, everybody should think like, oh my gosh, I could have my own little mini, you know, assistant or I could have my own little army of interns if I can just describe what I need them to do. And I think that's really interesting. The last thing I will say is I have a very almost exact workflow in Zapier agents. It's called my Sunday scaries prep. I do it on Sundays when I start to feel lots of anxiety. Yeah. Now what I'm planning for the next week. And the one ad that I put in

here is you can actually mix professional and personal stuff. So I put in. So I put in, there, if my mornings allow me to walk my kids to school, block off, you know, this hour to this hour because I know I can like walk the kids to school. And by Sundays, you haven't booked me on an early morning, you don't get me. And so like add these little, you know, call out days that I don't have time scheduled for lunch. Like call out days where I have six hours of back to backs with no break. Like give me an opportunity to improve my calendar. So I do think in addition to prep, you can a little like calendar optimization too, which is really nice. Totally. I agree. Like, yeah, which meetings might be able to combine or get rid of that look

duplicative? You know, give me some recommendations for optimizing my focus time. Like, totally, the sky's the limit with these things. And yeah, you can totally combine personal and professional calendars into this to make it a jack of all trades and do everything. But this one, yeah, this one for me is focus on work. You know, and that if you really want hyper-efficiency, you just make an agent that says, find all the meetings. cancel all of them to be giving me my tape. Yeah, the Ron Swanson agent. I don't know if you watch Parks and Recreation, but April Ludgate scheduled all of his meetings for like March 31st one year because she didn't think that existed. Yeah, exactly. Perfect. I'd do all my meetings for March 31st.

You know, you have one other meeting related workflow, which I think is really interesting, which is making sure that the meetings that you do really are high value. Yeah. So I'd love to, for you to walk us through what you do there. Totally. So there's, a few things on the other side of meetings that I do. So one of them is, you know, this is a way, the CEO of Zapier. So I was basically the way this workflow came up was we used Fathom for our meeting note taking. So I was manually going into Fathom after each executive meeting and giving it a prompt. Like, how did we perform against the five disfunctions of a team, which is a framework we used from the table group or who in this meeting could have spoke up more. And I was giving it prompts

to see how Fathom did with more reasoning and more of a loose like seedback, creative prompt versus what were the action items, which of course it does excellently. And over time, I was like, this is pretty useful. And so I was manually doing that and Fathom sending it to the exec team. And wait time at this message, he's like, I feel like we need to turn this meeting coaching on across the org. It's a pretty useful accountability. mechanism. I think the other thing here is when feedback is maybe automated, growth through feedback is one of our values. So it's part of how the company runs. But when feedback is expected after a meeting and becomes a part of routine and coaching, then folks learn to expect it and it's part of their

behavior. It doesn't make their like, you know, that nervousness spike up when they get feedback come in. So I think the more feedback folks can get the better. But I think the other thing this does is take some spit off the ball. So, so, you know, after meetings, I've worked at this team, this exec team for five years. So no one would be offended if I said, like, you know, Brandon, you really, like, should have spoken up on that topic. I can call them out because they've given me the permission to do that. But for folks who are newer to organization or don't have that comfort level with the team, you can build this meeting coaching across the org to and automate it based on any meeting transcript. So, you know, I started working with him.

with, you know, with fellow, because we're moving over to fellow for AI note taking and was testing an agent, you know, I was giving Wade, you know, here's an example of the feedback it generated, it gave him speaking time, it gave him, you know, what went well, it gave him opportunities to amplify impact. And then he's like, this coaching is too soft. Like this, this is still what went well. Let's have it be tougher. So then I gave it, you know, I fixed the agent instructions to give it a better balance of being demanding and supportive, which is a term we use a lot here at Zapier of like you will have to be a demanding later, but you also have to be supportive. So I gave him this one, which did give some more growth opportunities, like address misalignment

more directly, you know, challenge the decision-making speed. It seems like you have some fear of conflict. And so we worked at that, gave it a more concise version, thought it was good enough to ship. And then so now we've we've shipped this kind of meeting feedback. automation system through fellow, but this basically takes all of the transcript content, meeting metadata, make sure there's some, you know, some parameters. Like if I'm meeting only 10 minutes, probably not worth the feedback and make sure it's only Zab Your employees, make sure there's, you know, only sufficient context to offer valuable specific feedback. And then for each participant, it can look up their Slack, match their email just to Slack,

and then send them some, you know, some feedback. And I gave it context on our company values, you know, some of our meeting norms, you know, how we think about decision making. And then these are impact behaviors for like what we expect from folks at Zapier. And then I gave it the five dispensions of a team. And so I really works on this prompt over time to help it generate this direct, constructive feedback on all these dimensions. And then, you know, you can see what the outcome is going to be. And this is, you know, clarifies it's AI generated. It's coming from a bot. gives, you know, very quick feedback after a meeting of one to two specific growth opportunities and one to two things they can do next time. So this is something that I think can, over time,

really just change the way that a team works together and change the usefulness of a meeting. So this is maybe not something that was a huge part of my job. And I don't calculate this as like a big time saving agent for myself, kind of like the meeting prep was. But this is something that's like really reinforcing the company culture and making folks better at their job. So I think it's cool to build stuff like this. That's more just enablement and accountability for folks, especially among the exec team. So you make sure that they're being like the best displayers of company values and norms over time. So this is a fun one that I had a good time creating with Wade.

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Add Brex's banking solution with a high-year-old. treasury account and you've got a system that helps you spend smarter, move faster, and scale with confidence. One in three startups in the U.S. already runs on Brex. You can too at brex.com slash how I AI. So Courtney, what I think is great about this is people really think that culture is hard to systematically reinforce. You really think that culture has to be something that individuals or leaders have to carry through sort of soft interactions with the organization. But what you're showing here is more than, hey, can I give you, you know, skills coaching on closing a customer or I give you communication coaching on managing stakeholders?

This is, are we embracing our operating principles, our cultural norms, are we keeping an eye out for issues in interpersonal conflict or communication that we know teams are biased towards. And are we creating sort of a ego protective system in order to continually check and keep ourselves accountable to that system? And so I think, like, take the meeting part of this aside, the ability to kind of consistently check interactions and projects and initiatives inside your organization. with alignment on your stated cultural norms is a really powerful thing. And you know, you mentioned table group. I've worked with them before. And like you get, you get them like once

a quarter. Yeah. All this great work for your leaders. And you're like, yeah, we're going to like be the best team. We're totally aligned. Yeah. And then everybody feedback. But they're not whispering in your ear during the executive meeting. I mean, I'm sure they would for a price. But during your executive meetings, you know, they're not listening into your company, you know, town halls or AMAs. And so I think this is just such a nice way to observe your organization from a third party kind of like vantage point. Yeah. And then as you said, like just normalize feedback. This is very stressful feedback for people to receive maybe from their boss. Yeah. Like, hey, you didn't do this or you didn't do that. But if you know

everybody in the meeting is getting feedback, it's coming from sort of a neutral event. evaluation place, then you might be more open to hearing and kind of adjusting your, your behaviors based on that feedback. Yeah, totally. I think, I think you hit the nail on the head with a few of the main reasons why I like this. I think it's, are we who we say we are, you know, are you who you say, are we what we say our culture is? And are we keeping that top of mind in between things like, you know, we're a fully remote company. We do only need a table group once a quarter, once a half. And so, So we need to keep these behaviors top of mind consistently. And folks have a hard time keeping anything top of mind for that long. And so making sure this is repetitive and continuing to reinforce those things as valuable. But, yeah, I mean, we've got the other type of agent for, you know, sales reps, for example, that gives them after gone calls, what they could have done, that's more like, okay, you should have brought up this ROI or this metric or, you know, more specific sales coaching. But I love the culture stuff.

Okay, this is great. So we have schedule prep. We have culture checkpoints, which I think are awesome. But let's answer the question with AI that I'm not saying every IC manager and leader in the organization thinks about a lot, but they might, which is, will this fly with CEO or will this fly with executive A or how do I know I'm not walking into a tough meeting? So you've done you've done some work to sort of of stress test what your CEO might want or participate in without having to bother him. So I'd love to see your sort of exact replicate workflows. Totally. So yeah, again, on the meeting side, but this is a GPT I built within Open AI chat, GPT. And we have this public feed in Slack, which is feed TEPs, which are basically any strategic doc that need review across the company. We've kind of centralized this in a feed for transparency, accountability, and make sure folks know why we're making certain decisions. And so the folks were often coming to me for thought partnership of like, hey, here's my doc. Do you have any feedback on it before I share this

with exec? You know how weighed things. You've worked in them for five years. What do you think about this? And I love doing that thought partnership stuff and I don't want to replace it. But again, it's not scalable and I don't want to be a bottleneck for someone to keep. get their doc out into the world. And so I built a GPT that kind of thinks like I do and has some of the same materials of like company values and norms, but it helps people sharpen these T-ups. And so sometimes it makes sure that, you know, folks come into a meeting with more confidence and their opinions are stress tested and the right data is included and make sure we make the most of those meetings that we're in. But sometimes the T-Up is so clear now that we can skip the

meeting entirely, which is great as well. So you can see here, like, you know, Wade said he, he tried it out, caught several things that would strengthen the work. We've got, you know, Lindsay saying, I was worried it would just tear my dock apart, but it suggested really great simple tweaks. And so we gave it a bunch of knowledge. So I'll dive into that right now. So this is the exact prep, GPD. I gave it a prompt here to say give feedback on a TIP doc, which was one of the main prompts considered. And I created a fake doc, which is a very, very poor T-Up, just to give an example for this. So this was a T-Up that basically I just said create a really bad E-A-T-Up doc.

So this is like, you know, gives a really loose purpose. You know, it doesn't have an approver. It's like just something we've been thinking about. It doesn't have much background. So it's a bad doc. So it's not, but it's not going to give you the most exciting feedback. but it goes in and again, like takes the spit off the ball of feedback and helps people, you know, get more confident.

But this is saying, you know, this reads more like a jam session than a T-Up. You will get better feedback. If you clarify these things, let's tighten it up. And so it gives a quick read of what you have, gives feedback on how to strengthen it to service tradeoffs, out of recommendation. And then, you know, it gives an example of rewrite even in this case because the doc was so loose. on details, but it gives, you know, a couple top fixes before the bullpen and then, which is what we call these kind of TEP meetings and then one bold coaching question. So I love that it does this and even

gives you a suggested next step. Like let's let's give a tight Wade style one page rewrite of this so it's bullpen ready. So I love that. And this this GPT is built off of the back of, I'll dive into really quick. But it's built off the back of, you know, again, our team norms, our revenue roadmap, our strategy memo, good examples of T-ups, you know, Wade feedback tuning, I'm managing up to Wade, doc. So it gives like all this context on the back end that can help simulate people's feedback, again, to make sure they're sharper, clearer and better at unlocking decisions. So I love this one because it's, again, just helps enable everyone at Zapier. I love when, the things that I build don't only help me, but then can have these kind of ripple effects within

the organization. I think that's how you can become really an AI champion and transform your org is by starting with your own wins, you know, start with your own meeting prep or whatever, but then be like, okay, how can I enable the next set of folks on this? How can we make this, like, org-wide? And so I love that. I love that this is really something anybody can use. You know, I created it in chat to BT for many reasons, but one of them being that I don't have context to the conversation so folks can really feel comfortable putting all their information in there and making sure that, you know, no one's on the back end, like, reviewing it. I think we can see the, I think we can see some analytics here on, you know, 278 people have used this to

sharpen a strategy doc. So again, it feeds back into things like my impact reviews and showing that I'm enabling the whole org. So I love this one as well for just making sure our meetings are more efficient, making sure I'm not a bottleneck. And then I can still provide my coaching where it makes sense. And I can still have those people where I'm thought partnering on with their docs. But this helps me scale me basically and scale the execs before it gets to a meeting. Yeah. And what I would say is people also love when you come to an exact meeting or a feedback session where you say, I've already checked it against our strategy or I've already tried to do a loop of this with this GPT. Like just that extra effort to go through.

an independent loop before taking synchronous time to get feedback is both probably improving the quality of your work, but also just saving people's time and people really appreciate it. So I think that sort of initiative is also useful. And what I want to go to for our last use case is really you've extended strategic thinking through the organization with another tool. So I'd love to see kind of our last strategic alignment tool that you've built using AI because I think it's a really neat one. Yeah. So one thing we just launched about a month ago is in Notebook LM.

So this is enabled through Google. And this is like the announcement we made in Slack to give you a high view of why we did this and what it is. but it's basically a strategy companion, which we know that folks have a hard time looking at this big picture strategy work sometimes and then saying, okay, how does that impact me? And sometimes it's just hard to find the answers you're looking for within all these different strategy docs, all hands, meetings. And so we gave folks this basically knowledge base. Here's a screenshot of it of what these look like in reality. I just cleared out the summary of our strategy to make sure I'm not like, you know, totally revealing everything here.

But what's great is that we can continue to add sources over time. So you can see we've got a few dozen sources in here, which are everything from the top-level strategy doc to all hands we've had, to transcripts from other meetings we've had around strategy to every org's strategic action plan. And so folks can go and interact with these, but they can also interact. with this in a chat capacity and ask it anything they want. So here's an example of it in real life. So, you know, I'm saying I just gave it a simple prompt of as an executive assistant, how can I contribute to Zapier's 2026 strategy? And it's saying, oh, that's a great question.

We, I think you can help with champion clarity, focus and speed, make sure we're spending time on the right priorities, you know, make sure that you're driving internal AI transformation. And so I love it gives me, you know, some of that and connects back to the sources. But there's also fun things here like this. It auto generates a podcast. So I don't know if I'm fully showing my computer sound here, but I'll play it for a couple of seconds. This is fully AI generated just based off of the back of these sources. So it talks like this.

Welcome to the deep dive. Today we're really giving you the essential shulcut here. Absolute alignment on the strategy. We're pulling the core ideas straight from the Zapier, 2026. And all this is AI generated of things you can create. So it really helps make the strategy interactive instead of a static doc and static thing and helps folks get their questions answered again before going to their leader or going to someone in their org. And so I love this for just enabling folks to be able to connect their work and be able to query this over time. And it's

something that we can keep updated and make sure that it has the most recent information. So everyone can get value out of it. So Courtney, I love these use cases. What I keep reflecting on, it's people are like, oh, EA's are going to go in this age of AI. And I'm like, have you worked with a fabulous yay? Because the second they automate one task, they figure out 10 more that are so high leverage for the organization, culture carrying behaviors, strategic like communication, operational efficiency. Like, you are just demonstrating that this can happen in a next.

level. And so zooming back out, what we saw today was everything from helping yourself dig, dig out of a busy calendar with meeting prep to enforcing your cultural goals and leadership norms through always on feedback, checking feedback ahead of a synchronous meeting. So you can make sure it's aligned with both how executives want to receive it, but also kind of the important business initiatives and goals of the company. And then finally, how you can take all this content that's always, I mean, I just don't know an organization that is not consistently writing strategy documents, just one strategy document to the next, big strategy document, little strategy document, strategy updates, strategy goals. And so just creating a purpose built repository

for that information that can then be accessed in a multimodal way for people to learn, align their work, be educated, all that kind of stuff, I think is super awesome. So these were really, really great workflows. We're going to do quick lightning round and then we will get you out of here. I think the first thing is kind of this thing I said, which is a lot of people think your role is going away or they're afraid of AI taking over this role. And I think you're showing, actually, you're just becoming so much higher leverage. It have to be having so much more fun. So tell me, how do you respond to that feedback around AI, and in particular, the kind of EA role? I definitely am a believer that AI can only enable us in this role. I think it's a when, not an if.

We will have to be folks that adopt these tools. There is simply too much to do. I think there's the one of the biggest problems that EAs have is we always have more work that we want to do them we have time for. And so that's what I'm consistently hearing. I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time. Like, this is how we can do that. And I mean, to, I don't like talking about myself very much, but to humble brag and tie this back to real impact, I've gotten three promotions since I've been here and been able to work myself out of multiple roles. And, you know, I think that this is how you can do that. you can be this really great AI partner for your company and make sure that you're at the forefront and take all that busy, manual, repetitive work off your plates. You can do the human stuff,

the fun stuff, the stuff you like to do, the stuff that's creative and relationship-driven and those things that we wish we had time for. And so I think that it's just, it's such an exciting thing for our role and I don't think it's going to take our jobs. There may be, you know, certain admin things it does take eventually, but it's not going to take the whole thing. Think about the scope of what we do. Our whole job is to be, you know, all wide across the org and a little bit of depth in each area. But now you can be wide across the org, have more depth and have more time for projects and special things that you can do for your team. Okay. So speaking of special things, you have been one of the people I think is closest to answering this question, which is how close do you think we are to replicating executives?

How happy is Wade with your AI versions of him? And do you think we're actually working towards a world where those get quite high fidelity relative to individuals, preferences, feedback, thought process, communication process? Yeah, it's a great question. I think there are certain. parts where we're getting kind of close on. So over time, you know, I used to think of myself as a clone of Wade in certain instances. I could write comms like him. I could run his schedule. I could do things like him. And now we've got a clone of AI tools that are helping me do things like him, too. So there's certain parts of what he thinks and does that we're pretty close to replicating with these AI tools. What I'm not sure of is Wade or any of. exec um but speaking just for weight here he's a constant learner he is he is ingesting so much

information learning new things trying new things building every day like hands on keyboard like the amount uh he can grow and learn like the pace of that is so high that i wonder how you could keep these models up to date with that because like i you know i know they they update fast but like how can you how can you grow at the pace of that someone's brain and how your evolving does change your thought process does change over time so there's things old things in zap your history where someone's like oh i heard wade said we'll never do xyz and he's like that was an old decision that was an old decision like i've so much new context that's changing the way i think and so for a leader who's constantly adapting changing the way they think and using new

information to help them make smarter decisions. How do you, how do you replicate that part of it? I don't know. There's things, but the consistent side, like how he writes internal memos or, you know, how he writes certain things are pretty close to replicating. Okay. And then final question, when AI Wade is not replying to you the way you want or you're not getting what you need out of a specific prompt, what is your prompting technique? Do you, are you all an all caps girl? What do you do here? Oof, I'm not an all-caps girl. I'm a ramble.

So I love the dictate feature and I love to talk to it. And I give it feedback very, very direct. I'm just very direct as a person and demanding. And so I do that. I'm like, I don't understand why you're doing it this way. Show me a reasoning of why you did it that way because I told you to do this. And this is what I'd like to see. And here's what you back I have.

And I just ramble and give it, you know, everything I'm thinking. I think folks like sometimes don't know where to start. and try to give it this very specific feedback and write it. No, just like give it top of mind, pretend it's someone with no feelings and be demanding. So I don't know. Hopefully the AI robots don't come for me. I do think things and thank you sometimes. Good. Good. Yes, AI. AI. We know you have feelings. I don't know. We'll see what happens in 10 years. Yeah. Okay, Courtney, this has been so great. Where can we find you? And how can we be helpful? Yeah, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I love posting about additional use cases, things I'm building, workshops we're having.

But I'd love for y'all to check out this EA exec ops AI playbook I just made recently, which has like, you know, six different categories of things that the EAs do consistently in different ways we've automated that and ways that folks can replicate it and give me feedback on it. I'd love to hear what we're missing, what we can build out more. I'm looking for new things to build all the time. so I love getting feedback from the community and what would be helpful. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us.

Yeah, thank you, Claire. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show. at how IAIIPOD.com.

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