Agents of Scale

Amit Bendov started Gong on a bet most people thought was backwards: the truth about a deal does not live in the CRM, it lives in the conversation. A decade and $500M+ in ARR later, that idea looks obvious. He has built one of the most AI-native companies in enterprise software on it. And yet he is the guy telling everyone to be careful. Not "use AI less," he is emphatic that you should use it a l...

Sabba Keynejad, co-founder and CEO of Veed.io, says 99% of companies shouldn't build their own AI model. Veed did it anyway. Sabba joins Wade Foster and Dan Slagen (SVP Marketing at Zapier) on Agents of Scale for a grounded conversation about the state of video AI. Why it's still 2-3 years behind LLMs. Why Veed built Fabric 1.0 despite every reason not to. And what most companies get wrong about A...

Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow, joins Wade Foster on Agents of Scale to discuss what that means for marketers, how the playbook is changing, and why your SEO team is already your AEO team. Guy's point: AEO is a natural evolution of SEO, not a replacement. But the work is real. Content shifts from keywords to questions. Authority shifts from backlinks to consensus in plain text. Brand and P...

Ryan Meadows joins Wade Foster and Dan Slagen on Agents of Scale to talk about how his revenue org is being rebuilt from the ground up: no traditional BDR team, AI-assisted outbound, customer feedback shipped in minutes, and creativity as the new hiring signal. Ryan's point: when your product lets almost anyone build software, you can't run the old playbook. You have to throw away 70-80% of it. AI...

Fifteen years after The Lean Startup , Eric Ries is watching a new generation of founders rediscover and stress-test the core ideas behind build-measure-learn. AI has made the build step radically faster. Code that used to take weeks can now appear in minutes. But Eric's warning is sharp: when building gets cheaper, measurement and learning become the new bottlenecks. Teams that use AI to close th...

Rick Nucci has spent more than a decade building AI-native knowledge systems at Guru, long before the current LLM wave. In this episode of Agents of Scale , Rick joins Wade Foster to explain why so many enterprise AI efforts get stuck in pilot purgatory. His core argument: the problem is not just which AI tool a company picks. It is whether the organization has trusted, governed context that every...

Most companies are scrambling to figure out AI. Wistia did the hard part first — a total culture reset that made a 188-person company operate with the efficiency of a 30-person startup. Then AI poured gasoline on it. Chris Savage co-founded Wistia nearly 20 years ago, grew it to serve hundreds of thousands of businesses, and took on $17 million in debt to buy out investors and stay independent. He...

Product and leadership roles are changing—and “PM is dead” still holds. Claire Vo, CEO of ChatPRD (100,000+ users) and former CPTO at LaunchDarkly, Color Health, and Optimizely, joins Wade to talk about what that means for how you show up: as a leader driving adoption or as someone deciding whether to lean in. They cover why CEO "AI Mandates" and headcount freezes don’t move the needle—and what do...

Most companies wait for their tech team to lead AI adoption. At Howard Hughes, the push started from the CFO's office. Carlos Olea spent decades mentally cataloging process inefficiencies — as an auditor, he'd spot problems he had no authority to fix; as a finance leader, he'd hit budget or technology walls. When AI broke through both barriers, he pulled out his backlog and started building. His f...

Recruiting is in an arms race: job seekers spray AI at every open role; recruiters crank filters to keep up. Nobody wins.  ⚡ Kristen Habacht—CEO of Elly and former head of revenue at Trello (then Atlassian) and CRO at Typeform—thinks the fix isn’t more filters. It’s tech that actually learns, so recruiters can do the human work. Wade and Kristen talk about why most ATSs are “filing cabinets,” wha...

Is SaaS about to be replaced by people “vibe-coding” their own apps — or is something deeper at stake? Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, joins Wade to cut through the hype and give a refreshingly practical view of how companies should show up for AI. Dharmesh argues the right question isn’t “How do I compete against AI?” but “How do I compete with AI?” — and explains how culture, curio...

Most companies talk about becoming “AI-first.” Very few actually stop the business to make it real. Wes Schroll — Founder & CEO of Fetch — joins Wade to unpack what it actually takes to scale a consumer platform, evolve a decade-old company, and integrate AI without losing focus, culture, or trust. From building his first business at 14 to leading a reward destination that now influences more...

Most security playbooks weren’t built for an era where AI moves faster than policy. Rob T. Lee says the default answer of “no” is creating a far bigger problem: shadow AI — widespread, unsanctioned usage that quietly exposes organizations to risk. Rob T. Lee — Chief of Research & Chief AI Officer at the SANS Institute — joins Wade to unpack pragmatic ways leaders can move forward without break...

Most enterprise AI talk sounds great in theory—until you try to make it work across 40 disconnected systems. Jason Cottrell says that’s exactly where the real wins are hiding. As CEO of Orium (and the new president of the MACH Alliance), Jason has seen what happens when companies stop chasing one big AI solution and start stacking small, composable ones. The result? For one retailer, a 9-month tra...

Grammarly didn’t just change its company name—it changed the story of AI. In a deep-dive conversation following the company's rebrand, Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra joins Zapier CEO Wade Foster to unpack why this move signals a seismic industry shift: AI is moving from tools you have to remember to use to infrastructure that works wherever you do. Superhuman’s “AI superhighway” already makes 100...

What happens when AI meets 10 years of enterprise data? Box CTO Ben Kus joins Zapier CEO Wade Foster to dig into how enterprise AI actually works when scale, security, and governance aren’t optional. They explore what happens when agents start reasoning across real customer data—and why the hardest part isn’t the model, it’s everything around it. Ben shares how Box is teaching AI to work with huma...

AI that sells, reasons, and closes like your top rep? It sounds terrifying—but it’s not. Amanda Kahlow’s Superhumans are proving that automation doesn’t erase people; it elevates them. Her team rewards employees who replace their own jobswith AI by promoting them, not firing them. And her customers? They’re seeing sales cycles shrink from 22 days to 2 and average deal sizes double. In this episode...

For Chris Pedregal, CEO of Granola, AI isn’t about replacing thinking—it’s about deepening it. He joins Zapier CEO Wade Foster to talk founder-to-founder about what it takes to build products that think with you, not for you. Together they explore why it’s the best time in history to be a builder, how AI can eliminate busywork without erasing human judgment, and why context will define the next de...

Replit’s mission: turn 100 million people into builders. CEO Amjad Masad joins Zapier CEO Wade Foster to discuss the real blocker to AI adoption—creativity, not code—and how enterprises can unlock it. They cover why most users freeze at the prompt, how social contagion drives adoption, and why your next “employee” might be an AI agent sitting in Slack.

What does it take to reinvent a billion-dollar SaaS company in the age of AI? For Intercom, the answer was refocusing the business, betting everything on an AI-first future, and a $50 million pricing model gamble. In this episode, co-founder Des Traynor pulls back the curtain on the bold moves that reset Intercom’s trajectory and turned its AI agent, Fin, into a powerhouse that resolves 65% of cus...

This week’s full episode is only available through ZapConnect. To catch the full conversation with Airtable Co-founder & CEO Howie Liu and Zapier CEO Wade Foster, register for free at https://zapier.com/zapconnect —available on-demand until October 24. What does it take to build a company that truly grows with its customers? In this special ZapConnect edition of Agents of Scale, Airtable Co-fo...

Most weeks on Agents of Scale , you’ll hear from CEOs and execs scaling AI across industries. But this week, we’re zooming in on how AI can transform a single person—and by extension, entire businesses. Joe’s story starts with living in his car after cycling through 32 jobs. Then he discovered Zapier. What began as small automations for a roofing company turned into a career building systems for i...

What started as a “texting call center” for real estate leads is now an enterprise platform powering millions of conversations across industries. Verse—acquired by NICE and trusted by brands in healthcare, higher ed, and financial services—evolved from 100% human to AI-first, with humans still in the loop to train, guide, and build trust. Zapier CEO Wade Foster sits down with Verse co-founder Avi...

Before AI copilots and receptionists, trades pros were still running businesses from binders and carbon-copy invoices. Jobber set out to change that—and today powers 300,000+ plumbers, landscapers, and contractors. CTO Forrest Zeisler joins Zapier CEO Wade Foster to share how the trades moved from manual chaos to AI copilots that have already booked 200,000+ after-hours calls and coached pros to w...

Gamma had signups, usage, and early traction—but growth was flat. With the fundraising climate collapsing and runway shrinking, co-founder Jon Noronha and his team realized traction alone wouldn’t cut it. In this episode, Jon joins Zapier CEO Wade Foster to share how Gamma rebuilt its product in three months, unlocked runaway growth, and scaled past $50M ARR in just six. He also explains why “dabb...