In this interview, Carilu Dietrich explores how AI agents are reshaping marketing and go‑to‑market workflows, and Wade Foster, co‑founder of Zapier, announces three major advances. First, Zapier’s new AI orchestration platform lets users embed AI agents directly into workflows that span over 8,000 connected apps, moving beyond static "if‑this‑then‑that" automations. Second, Zapier adds human‑in‑the‑loop controls through Slack, giving teams a trusted way to monitor and verify probabilistic agent actions in higher‑risk environments. Third, Zapier’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server—now available inside Anthropic’s Claude—provides a standard interface for agents to discover and invoke external tools, effectively giving Claude the ability to take real‑world actions (e.g., reading calendars, pulling Salesforce reports). The conversation then shifts to the broader landscape of proliferating agent capabilities from Salesforce, OpenAI, and others. Dietrich asks how leaders will choose among competing agents; Foster emphasizes Zapier’s horizontal, cross‑platform integration advantage. They discuss practical patterns: breaking complex tasks into discrete steps, assigning each step to the most suitable LLM, and thereby reducing hallucination while optimizing performance. The interview concludes with the view that horizontal integration platforms like Zapier may win the "agent war" because most enterprises rely on a mosaic of SaaS tools rather than a single vendor.
Chapters
I've been digging deeper and deeper into both AI vendors and specific examples of what real-world marketing teams are doing today to, to use AI, to use agents, to use automations. And Zapier keeps coming up. In fact, just today, maybe an hour ago, I published a blog Um, I write a blog at www.carilou.com, that means three W's, carilou.com. And I wrote, uh, about a specific, um, research process that, that one really innovative marketer at Support Logic has rolled out, um, that started as a BDR research project and has really informed across the go-to-market funnel, how they, um, understand different prospects, personalize messages, and, and make their team much more effective. So on Zapier amongst. Several that I've been looking at recently. So Wade, you guys just in the last week have actually rolled out some really big leaps forward in your agentic capabilities. Do you want to give us, give us the highlights of the news?
Yeah, so last week we launched our AI orchestration platform. It integrates AI agents with over 8,000 apps. Zapier is the most connected platform that does this type of thing. And it allows users to add AI agents directly into those workflows. It enables those systems to intelligently adapt and make decisions rather than just following predefined instructions, which that was sort of the world pre-AI where you'd have this like, if this, then that, that, that, that sort of style logic. You know, alongside that, we've added human-in-the-loop controls via Slack. I think this is a really important mechanism if you're introducing agents into your workforce, especially if you want to do it in a trusted way. You know, oftentimes these Well, these agents are probabilistic, they're not deterministic. That means they may not do the thing you totally expect it to do. As we start to deploy these things in more and more riskier environments, you're going to want to have a mechanism to verify that these things are performing the way that you expect them to. Those are the two big announcements that we've had in the last week.
Well, and there's a third too, right?
Oh yes, our Zapier MCP server. We launched our MCP server earlier this year. And the really exciting thing is it's available in Claude. So if you are a user of Claude, which is a product from Anthropic, you can install the MCP server right there and interact with any of these 8,000 different apps directly. So, you know, it can be simple things like, hey, can you tell me what's on my calendar for today? You know, okay, hey, I haven't caught up with this person in a while. Can you tell me more about them? All the way to like, hey, pull this report from Salesforce or pull this data from HubSpot or do this action in this way. And so it really gives you a lot more— it gives Claude the ability to actually take action for you in the real world versus sort of just tell you the instructions for how to go do that thing.
And break down what an MCP server is for people who aren't as close to the cutting edge as you are or may not have already be deploying.
Sure. So MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It's a standard way for agents to discover and act on external tools. You can kind of think of it a little bit like, you know, what APIs do for like SaaS servers or SaaS applications, like MCP does for agents. They can talk to each other in a particular way. So that's like the most simplistic way to probably describe it.
And so one of the things that's on my mind is just that there's this proliferation of agents. Salesforce announced their agent strategy last year. It was the basis for their whole Dreamforce. You know, you've integrated now and so you're providing the integration layer, it sounds like, behind Claude's agent capabilities. OpenAI, of course, is going to roll out agents. Potentially all of our different platforms will roll out agents. You know, one of the advantages of Zapier is that you're really horizontal. You've traditionally been this integration layer that cuts across all different companies. But how do you think that leaders are going to pick and choose their agent processes if there's kind of this proliferation of agent capabilities throughout their tech stack?
Yeah, I do think that, you know, One of the unique things that I think we are—
Is that my internet, Julia, or is that Wade's internet? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Julia and I were worried about my internet because I'm traveling, but it seems like we've lost Wade for a moment. So we will wait for him and talk a little bit more. I guess I'll just talk for a second that one of the things that I'm seeing is one of the reasons I'm running into people who are using Zapier is because they are trying to stitch together a lot of different platforms. And so some of the agents within a specific platform are like more optimized for that, that platform. So again, walking through a type of process that I've seen in two instances recently. That's a bit more of the AI. I don't know where I guess some of the AI ends and some of the agents begin. Hey, we've got Wade Foster back.
Hey, sorry about that, everyone.
Yes, no problem. So I was just thinking about some processes that I've seen recently where people are starting in Salesforce and they have a button that like creates an analysis of a sales call or a sales account planning, or starts research for sales in their Salesforce instance, but then goes out across a lot of different systems. And it might go out across Perplexity, it might go out across OpenAI, it might do searches on SEC databases. So it's really moving horizontally and moving through a lot of different types of services to bring things back. And then what I'm seeing with a lot of the innovators is that the more stepwise they create their process, if they break it down into smaller steps, they're finding that there's A, less hallucination, and B, they're able to optimize different steps with different LLMs so that they find that there's better results from some of them. So I guess I was saying that my own personal opinion, I think that like some of the horizontal tools might win the agent, agent war because because really no one is a single platform company as much as Oracle or Salesforce, you know, wish they would be.
But give me the official answer. Totally. Like, I think we all have this dream of like, oh, I'll just delegate this like super high-level task to an agent. It will go figure out everything for us. And I think, you know, maybe we'll get there. But for where we're at today, folks are getting the most benefit by doing exactly what you described, like break the tasks down into very discrete bits. And then assign an agent to each one of those and then orchestrate those steps as you go. And then to your point, you can, you know, test and tune each bit along the way. And I think this is where, like, you know, we're having a— we're seeing a lot of success is helping our customers do that orchestration across all these different tools that they have. Because the reality is, you know, they've got some data over here that has really important access to information. You need to do a web search over here. You know, you maybe do 2 or 3 different web searches, but each of those need to be their own step because the agent starts to hallucinate if you try and combine all those those things. And so that ability to break it down into chunks is like a really important skill set, I think, for folks who are wanting to go deploy agents in the future.
