LaunchPod - Phil Lakin === Intro: [00:00:00] Our thinking was, could we actually deliver a product experience that gives you the best of both worlds, where you don't have to imagine everything, you get all the opinions of a lead router from day one, so you can open it up. It looks and feels like a lead router. Doesn't feel like a Zapier blank canvas. But if you lift up the hood and wanna engineer things, you get all these Zapier primitive building blocks to the point where it feels like you can edit the SAS yourself. Welcome to Launch Pod. The show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're joined by Phil Lakin, head of Enterprise Innovation at Zapier. In this episode, we discuss how Phil built no-code ops into a thriving community and SaaS product, and what led to its acquisition by Zapier, why Phil ended up leading the initiative on Zapier's first solution based product and the decision process behind making it lead router and how Zapier is driving AI transformation across both their org and others with hands-on boot camps. Agent workflows and a 97% AI literacy rate among employees. So here's our episode with Phil Aiken. Jeff: Phil, [00:01:00] welcome to the show, man. This, I'm stoked to have you on. This one's been a little while in the making. Phil: Yeah, here we are. We did it. Jeff: We we got through your, you're recovered all day enough though, like. Last time I think we talked you were, you were coming off a some back procedure and now I went and this past weekend screwed up my back. Not nearly as bad, but I'm Phil: No. Jeff: here all propped up and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brutal dude. Phil: A few weeks laid up in bed for like an automation person who likes to just constantly be tinkering with stuff. Blessing and a curse. I think I invented like 10 new products Jeff: spent, spent $10,000 on open AI calls and stuff like that. Phil: I kid you not, at one point during my recovery, I had to ping my buddies at Zeit which is just like an AI app builder. And I was like, Hey guys, like here's the thing. I'm already paying for the pro plan, which like I barely ever paid for sas, right? Like, 'cause, just like I just get a lot of free sas, right? Just give my rolled Zapier. And like, I pay for you guys already. I'm hitting limits every day. This is the only thing keeping me happy. Will you please just [00:02:00] temporarily remove my limits? And they did, which was really Jeff: Oh, that, that's, that's nice. I mean, you gave him a shout out here. See, so now even more people. Phil: look at that Karma. Yeah. Zes my favorite my favorite, like, kinda like, think about it, like vibe coding public applications tool. So like, you know, lovable and all that stuff. I just, they're my favorite. Jeff: I'll have to check that out. I use Lovable a lot as well, but I'll have to check out Zeit. Phil: Wait till you crack in, man. It's good. Jeff: But yeah, I mean, on your end stoked to have you on, like I was saying because, you know, you have done really interesting things. Started no-Code Ops, which was a community and company around basically building ops tools without, you know, no code. It got acquired by Zapier. You're over there now, head of what? Enterprise innovation. And just basically you get to. It might not be this cool, but when I look at it from when I see a post on LinkedIn and, and what you talked about, what we've talked about basically seems like you just get to do cool stuff at an awesome company build with ai, but you also put out their first like solutionize. Product that they've done up until, you know, everyone I'm sure is familiar with Zapier. It's, it's, you know, building blocks and a lot of how to stitch stuff [00:03:00] together. But they actually put out now a real solution that, that does lead routing. And that was, that was all you. So maybe let's start at the beginning here. . Phil: Yeah, I do wanna make one clarification I was definitely on the team as like for our first vertical role and like help lead it from the early days, but The, it was very much a team effort and , I wanna give a big shout out to that team, especially I always call him like the real pm the adult in the room that took over and like partnered with me from the early days, which is jb he's the guy and like all the other people that. The eng, like all the folks like that helped build it and get it to where it is. Like this is a large project and it's I'd say it was JB and i's kind of like baby, and now JB is like really taking it to the next level. I'm working on the ag transformation stuff at Zapier, but yeah, I, I have to call that out. Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I in here. I thought you just did it all in Zeit In some, in some Zapier. Phil: no. I wish, I wish. Jeff: good. Yeah, it, it is always great though that like, I think that's interesting thing about product or you know, marketing or any kind of company, right? No one ever does it [00:04:00] by themselves. , And a huge part of it is, is that bigger ecosystem around and how do you enable it, how do you work people and, and all that. But yeah, no, I, I'm glad you called that out. Phil: Look, I mean the, the journey on this front really yeah, it did start with all the no-code ops stuff where I was like figuring out how to be a product manager for a SaaS company that I had. Like I'd never done that before. So Jeff: So? How'd you get, how'd you get there, man? I mean, like you were at Get Encompass and like legitimate companies and then you went, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna start a company slash community or, or just community. Phil: Yeah. So the, the, the short of it is, is that when I was at get I got asked to build out a driver onboarding platform because everything was being done manually with like pen and paper to onboard drivers in our office in New York. We were going up against Uber and Lyft and like we needed an edge. And so they asked me to be able to onboard drivers in the field and do it electronically. And I said, cool, like, what team do I work with? And they're like, no, man. Like. You're an ops like you, you don't get a team. And so, I did just stand up every night for like a [00:05:00] month, just like late at night, into the night, just researching and googling like different tools and I didn't know what they were called at the time, but, you know, I, I looked, looked at a bunch of terms apps, white label, no code, eventually write all these terms. I would just like figure out. but then I eventually built a process. It was terrible. It barely worked. Uh, but it worked. And then we refined it over time and the stack ended up being Pronto Forms, which is like an app that can live on an iPad that can, you know, take in forms, but it can do it offline. 'cause like we had terrible service when we were out in the field. So that was really cool. We use Google Sheets as the, the kind of like driver tracking system and it would, all the data would get sent there. And we use Zapier to connect everything. That's where I discovered like Zapier and I really leaned in. And so yeah, built a process that onboarded like over 25,000 drivers under like a year and a half. And like it was nuts. And so, eventually you know, that company combined with another company called Juno. They brought all of us one day from the US branch into a very nice hotel room. And there was like the very expensive Fiji bottles of water on the table. And I was like. Oh, they [00:06:00] spent money on the water. This is not gonna be a good meeting. And so, you know, they let the whole company go it happens in tech, it's a rite of passage. And then you know, I spent months like figuring out like, dude, what do I even do? Like, I don't even know what I do. Like I do a little bit of this No Cody stuff. I do like some onboarding stuff and I eventually . Found you know, compass, who actually reached out to me through this platform called Underdog where they were like, it's funny, we're looking for someone exactly like you who can use no-code tools to help with onboarding. I was like, get out. Like this is a real job. I eventually not only did that, but like. Eventually became the first solutions architect at the entire company to work across all of operations. Doing known and low code projects. Fell in love with the field. No code started blowing up around that time. And I had this idea where I was just like, look, I was watching communities like Maker Padd, oddly enough also acquired by Zapier that we're blowing up. But all these communities at the time, you know, maker Padd, no-Code founders, like all, we're all about founders and people building startup or SaaS tools with no-code, not the internal ops people like me. And so I wanted to build a community for [00:07:00] people like me. Right, like ops nerds, the intrapreneurs who were like building stuff, figuring stuff out, navigating internal politics, you know? And it turns out that around that time there was a lot of people starting to be considered marketing ops, sales ops, people, ops, which were essentially the verticalized version of all of those things. And so, I started putting out a newsletter. That newsletter then became a community. The community then rolled into like us doing some services for some companies. And then, and this was when I met my co-founder Brent who was in San Francisco at the time. We knew we wanted to build tooling for this audience, and we knew we wanted to build a SaaS tool. So we raised venture. And then I put in my two weeks notice at Compass once the first check from our first investor hit the bank. That was Jeff: There you go. And then you built built it into a community of like 1500 plus people, and Zapier came a knock in. Phil: Kim? Aka. Yeah. So the, the, the short-ish story there is I'd love to say I build a community. I'm a terrible community manager. I know, yeah. Yeah, it's really hard. I'm just gonna be honest. Like I can I'm really good at like the community canvas stuff, [00:08:00] like thinking about. You know, what's gonna get people jazzed about a community or, I'm really good at community marketing, like getting people into the community, keeping the community alive, which is arguably the hardest part and keeping everyone happy. And programming I am God awful at. So thank God we had this woman Claudia cafe, who was our full-time community manager, and she built the community to 1500 people. And so, yeah, we built this community we learned their issues and their challenges. And we ended up building an observability tool called operator, where like, essentially you change management tool. If you were to change a field here, what's it gonna break somewhere else, you know? And so, lot of hard work there. Lots of battle scars and lessons learned, man. But yeah, eventually we got really close with Zapier. Wade was an early investor in ours, the CEO there. And then about a year ago we were acquired and now, , I'm the head of enterprise innovation here, doing stuff. Jeff: Nice , and one of the benefits. Of that is, like we talked about the very top top of the show. You got to be a part of the team that, you know, and a big part of the team that put out, you know, Zapier's been around forever and, and it's always been [00:09:00] like connect more things and, and more triggers and more workflows, but now actually putting out solutions , and now it was just like something coded and built separately. Was this, is this just like Zapier parts put together? Like what is the, I'm just kind of nerding out on Phil: Oh, both. really really interesting. So let me, let me describe it like this, right? So first of all, when I was first at Zapier, I'm gonna admit this on a, on a product podcast, self-aware I'm an okay product person. I'm not great, right? Like, thank God for jb. Do you know what I mean? Vision-wise, I think I'm like, I'm, I'm a little bit better. But day-today, product management, I am. Not great. I'm okay now. Founder mode and figuring stuff out, like, and like going from zero to one, and the marketing of stuff and like the full cycle of that and like the iterations that go in between that I feel pretty strong at. Right. And so basically when I came to Zapier, they were like, Phil, we want you to partner with JB from product here. And just figure out like what vertical do we start with and what do we build for them? That was just like the big open canvas, ? because we knew we wanted [00:10:00] to go into some kind of verticalized solution. It was like a pretty easy decision around like, Hey, let's start with revenue op because like, let's be honest, revenue teams get all the money, they get all the tools, right? Like . Jeff: There's a big, big push in the, what was it, go to market engineering, Phil: market engineering, right? From like the clay team, you know, all that stuff, right? So there's clearly something there where there's like a lot of money and like, let, let, let's just go there. Like, let's not maybe build a new HR tool. Jeff: I mean, it is a good way to, to right. Prioritize a market who, who has money that they can take from their pocket and give to our pocket. Phil: Yep. Yep. Who's got money to spend and who's got expensive problems, you Jeff: Yeah. And lead routing's a real, I mean, a real problem, right? Like it's, I've lived that and Phil: big Jeff: it's, it's always one you could solve better, so, Phil: that was kind of just like, oh, let's throw a dart at the board and let's just start somewhere. Right? So we started with Rev ops, but now where we started Rev ops, that was a lot more in depth, right? So we said there's all these different areas of rev ops that people are already doing on Zapier. So [00:11:00] they're doing inbound lead routing. They're doing some outbound stuff. They're doing stuff across different stages of the sales process. They're doing all these orchestration things like building deal rooms automatically in Slack and like they're doing all these different things, So the question was, what SaaS are people paying for that? Does these things better than Zapier and like find those right? And then. Look at the differences between the two and see like where would it make sense to really expand our footprint, And so this is the big equation that we knew we wanted to solve right before we picked a specific. Kind of area to start, right? In terms of like revenue orchestration, let's call it, ? Because there's so many areas, right? There's the full inbound flow, there's outbound flows, there's communications along the deal cycle, right? There's all these different like vertical specific orchestrations. And by the way, orchestration's just like a series of automations and potential human in the loop steps, ? So it's just not one zap, it's like many automations, right? Connected together. So, we said this was our goal. This was like the most well articulated thing of the early days of the project, when everything was super messy. Zapier is like Lego blocks, really [00:12:00] easy to build whatever you want, But the problem with that is, is that you've gotta know what's possible, right? Which a lot of people don't, ? Then you've gotta have the time to build it, and then you've gotta have the time to maintain and update it. . People have that time for like, oh, someone submitted a form, send it to our CRM, maybe do some lead enrichment. That's easy, right? Building a whole lead routing system on that, like a 95 step journey and maintaining that bad. Jeff: Yeah, no thank you. Phil: And we looked at ourselves and we're like, this is a terrible experience. It's cool that you can build a 95 step Zap doing lead routing, That is genuinely a terrible experience and there's companies literally been built around the fact that that is a terrible experience, So we know that and not to also add into lead routing, which is super spicy. R and BDRs have high turnover, So in a lead routing dedicated vertical SaaS app, you change your list of BDRs. SDRs in one place. In Zapier. If you don't change it in the exact six places, it needs everything breaks. That's a terrible experience, we know that. so then we said, but on the other hand, these vertical SaaS apps, right? You need so many of these different apps for so many different parts of orchestration. They can [00:13:00] get very expensive sometimes, And. The second you need them to do something that they're not used to doing or integrate with something that, you know, they don't really integrate with. It also kind of breaks down, our thinking was, could we actually deliver a product experience that gives you the best of both worlds, ? Where you don't have to imagine everything. You get all of the opinions of a lead router from day one, right? So you can open it up, it looks and feels like a lead router. It doesn't feel like a Zapier blank canvas, but if you lift up the hood and wanna engineer things, you get all these Zapier primitive building blocks to the point where it feels like you can edit the sass yourself without knowing how to. Jeff: that, I mean, I can't speak for other companies, but that has been the problem is we had, we built our own lead routing and, and some of it was Zapier, some of it was actually just internally built code. And then we ended up going to a solution and we went back to another thing and we went back to a self-built thing. And now we're on external. You know, bought, purchased solution, but it's always the, the ping pong of Phil: Always. Jeff: too customizable, too much debt that we always have to maintain, doesn't do all the things we want, and then someone gets frustrated. We have to go back and forth, back and forth, back [00:14:00] and forth, and there's never, so I have to check this out ourselves actually. Phil: no, for sure. So, oh, new customer scored. Woo hoo. JB I got new intro coming. the whole idea is we wanted to build something in the middle, right? And the idea was. Could we not only do this for lead routing and rev ops for other folks too, right? Where it's like, look, no matter how easy we make Zaps to build, and by the way, if you could type a plain sentence, you can build a zap. Now we have like an AI copo, or if you could type a sentence, it'll build a zap for you, ? Even still, that's a lot of cognitive load to ask somebody, When they're used to just buying sas, right? There's all different types of buyers and there's all different types for building. And most, by the way, most normal people who aren't like, figure it out, tinker. No coder. People like me, they don't wanna build if they don't have to. I like to build, I'm a nerd, Most people are just like, just gimme the thing man. And then I'll let you know when I'm pissed off about it. so we wanna be able to deliver that experience, but allowing you to lift up the hood and so. That was our challenge. And then the other challenge was choosing one place to start. Because the other problem in product is when you're competing with other people that are already established in a category, you don't just get to do one thing better than them. [00:15:00] So one of the hard lessons we learned was the ability to lift up the hood and customize wasn't a good enough pull to be like, You are willing to sacrifice some of the other basic features you have and some of the lead routing capabilities you have from other systems yet? Jeff: . People don't switch tools for, oh, it's a little bit better. You have to be three x or five x or 10 x better, depending on what the functionality is. , To get someone to come over and then on top of it, like you, you certainly can't do key things less well. It's not like there's only one or two tools in this space yeah, , it's a great area. Like it leans into your specialties, I think both on your end and, and Zapier's end and you already had ops teams in, but at the same time, it is not an unpopular space to try and solve this problem. Phil: it's a really good problem space, but because of that, yeah, it's a little bit of a blood red ocean. And the part of it that we thought was gonna be deep blue was like, oh, you can customize it, but it's like, yeah, but the water's getting a little murky when like, we're missing some of the basics. So like, I'd say that that is the, that's the challenge. And like, I, I think we've done now a pretty good job at that. But you know. Where that came from was just like, it's [00:16:00] like the basics of product, right? But like I mean like we just talked to like 75 different folks about this stuff, right? the hard part was figuring out who was giving us what type of information. So we kind of broke it into like these different areas of like, if they're a Zapier user who's using us for this stuff, well, clearly they're gonna love this, right? Because they've identified the problem they've built with it, and this just makes it way easier to manage, right? But I'd say that's the smaller percent. The bigger folks we're going after is they're gonna look at this and go. Well, it really needs to have all these features for me to wanna switch, And so we had to build all those features, which like, I'd say we're getting pretty darn comparable, which is really cool to see. And and yeah, and so now like when you go into this lead routing product in Zapier, it literally just looks like lead routing SaaS, but you can lift up the hood and do. crazy stuff to the automations. 'cause what it's essentially doing in the background, this front end, and this is, I think the magic here is this opinionated front end is building a huge Zapier workflow in the back end for you. And that's pretty radical. Jeff: You guys just basically built a, a [00:17:00] magic front end , that obfuscates , the Zap building. So Phil: but it isn't a blank chat window, right? It's an opinionated piece of UI that you know and love. Jeff: right, which probably actually makes the, the Zap infrastructure behind it better because it could be more focused. It's not, you know, a giant ocean of options. It is somewhat constrained. How did you kind of. Go from that, like first go, which is, talking to Zapier customers who are used to building everything for themselves and kinda go to the next step of like, okay, , there's this group of people who, like you said, they want a lot more of the bells and whistles. They want it to be, some things need to be better some things to be as good and, and kind of how did you start to prioritize and figure out what that feedback was and, and what they needed and what they really needed versus what they just kind of thought they needed Phil: look, there's no secret here, man. Like, Jeff: there never is. I'm always, I'm always digging for like the secret, the secret thing. Phil: I just went to every competitor's website, ? Looked up all of their case studies, , and reached out to all of those people. It's just a lot of work in the weeds and like in this early days, There was no like UXR support . It was just like, dude, you guys are a zero to [00:18:00] one startup here at Zapier. Figure it out. Right? I was like, cool. If I were to find customers that I needed to talk to in this space, how would I find them? Okay. I could like rely on some like super crappy technographic data from some B2B enrichment firm, or I can literally just go to their websites and look at case studies Jeff: Right. Phil: and reach out to Jeff: you go. It is amazing, by the way, like how much people are willing to, to talk about things. I have never had problems reaching out to, to almost a functional, like, Hey, I'm curious about how you do this thing as long, you know, obviously not competitors, but short of that, people are wildly willing to talk about the things they've done and accomplished. Phil: have a good, good household name behind you. But yeah, like, so look, we talked to all those folks and to determine, to your earlier question, like what we found out was like, needed, not needed, right? I'd love to say there's a magic formula there, but it's just a lot of trial and error, . , Here's the thing that I learned though, and this is maybe tying back to a lesson learned from the no-Code Ops side, and this is a really tough one, and by the way, I'm still open to figuring out, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this too. It's really hard to know sometimes, right? Whether you're one feature away from gold, Or when to just cut your losses and stop [00:19:00] digging and start a new tunnel and, throw in the towel. I would say. With no code ops, like we fell into that with operator, ? I think we fell into the trap of just like one more feature, Like if we just had one more feature, if we just, if we just connected one more tool, if we just had this. But I think at the end of the day, the problem we were solving funny. Now it's a big problem of course with ai, right? So now there's all these like huge funded companies like trying to solve exactly what we were trying to solve around like. Observability and downstream impact. But the problem is no-code automation never had the zeitgeist effect that AI has. So it was just like not as popular as a problem to solve for CIOs and CTOs, whereas like now they're being forced to solve this thing. So it's like, ' cause their CEO's like, we need ai. It's like, well, that means a lot of things that I now have to observe and monitor. Whereas like the, the other world of no code was like, eh, yeah, some marketing apps, people are using it. We really don't care. So. Jeff: Once in a while, the wrong rep might get a lead and it'll be fine. It's not a big Phil: We'll be okay. Right. Who cares? Right. So that's the thing. I think with that, we were a little bit ahead of our time in the problem, but at [00:20:00] that time, looking back, we were not one feature away from gold. And, but we thought that we were. you gotta be careful there. 'cause customers will always tell you, oh, if he just has this, if he just has this, if he just has this Jeff: I've learned. You know, the hard way at some companies that there is problems that people have and the problems that, that you're solving. And like you right? You said you weren't one feature away. You were a couple years of market evolution away. And one feature. Phil: and, also Jeff: but Phil: yeah, probably Jeff: like one feature you can solve, , but you can't outgrow your market, right? Your market more than anything else. Obviously if you suck, like your market doesn't define Phil: Look, you could change how you talk to your market. And by the way, I have plenty of experience at that at Zapier too, right? Where like, we took this whole program of like running workshops at Zapier. This is the program that I'm working on now where it's like I was running all of these AI workshops at Zapier. It was like the big thing I got asked to do when I, you know, left the. The vertical program and went into this new role where I'm doing like a lot of AI training and was doing a lot of teaching and workshops and bootcamps and hackathons and experiments with customers who were like looking to expand z usage of AI adoption. And the feedback [00:21:00] was so good that I eventually like asked my manager, I was like, Hey, can I just like make a whole year long program for our enterprise clients on AI adoption? She was like. ? I don't know, why not? And so later day I put out a LinkedIn post and built 6 million pipeline just from that post. And like now, we literally have an entire AI transformation program that we run now at Zapier, where we help clients for a year go zero to one with all things AI across their org rollout. Jeff: That's pretty sweet. I mean, that's the thing, right? To put it indelicately, if you suck, it's not the market, it's probably you. But it might also be the market. Phil: Might also be your messaging of the thing that people just might not understand that you do it. And that's like the whole thing with AI transformation point that I was making. Like it could be you or your product, it could be your messaging, it could be the market, Jeff: but like you can, you can change your messaging. You can, you can change. Your Phil: can change your product, but you can't change the Jeff: solution, but the, the market is what it is. And like in your, in your case, right, that you guys could have been, you know, doing the most magical things on earth there. And if it wasn't, if it I talk to sales teams a lot where I'm talking about. You might have the best solution in a really, really hot market, but if that is the number 10 priority of the person you're talking [00:22:00] to, Phil: They don't Jeff: matter. Yeah. They don't give a crap. There's nothing you can do. So move on, like use your time better. In this case, right, you found, AI and AI transformation is a, is a hell a good problem to go after. Right now everyone wants it. Phil: Burning problem. Jeff: Selfishly, part of why I had you on here is I seen you talking about this stuff and, and I wanted to talk to you about internally like, you know, to do all this stuff, I mean, between what you guys had over at Zappy, you had Kieran Flanagan, the CMO for a little bit. He is, super AI focused all the time. I mean, you're there so many people , with great minds who have focused on, AI transformation, both. Externally in the products, but also like I am super curious to hear more about like, what, what have you found and how you and, and teams over there using it to, to move faster, better, strong, whatever the, whatever the DAF punk wording is. Right. Faster, harder, better, stronger, Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Look, we've got, I always say this about zapper, and I say this to folks, I talk about the AI transformation stuff too, all the time. Look, we've got a very high AI literacy rate at Zapier. I think the last published one was like 89, but we just redid all of our stats and we're actually at 97 [00:23:00] now, so like it's darn high. And that's not just check sheet T usage, that's like, you know, token usage across like where they're bringing AI into orchestration steps across the app. Agent usage. We have more bots than humans. We have an AI first hiring framework. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Phil: the thing is we cheated. I'll tell you how it's part nature, part nurture, right? The nature part comes from, we are a culture of builders. At Zapier, we attracted people that love Zapier. You build a Zapier first day of work. You we always have had this rule. You can't buy a piece of SaaS unless you can prove that you can't build it with Zapier. So we've had this builder, tinker Hackathon culture since like day one, so when AI came about, it was like, oh. Let's ramp that baby up, right? So that's the nature part of the business, right? This like thing that wasn't cool in the citizen development side, really like we just like rocked and rolled with, which was cool, but the nurture side came from our CEO, right? Specifically being like. Three alarm fire. [00:24:00] Everyone needs to be doing this stuff, ? We need to start building rituals here. We need to start talking about this stuff. We need to start pumping out features left and right here. We need to just move super duper fast, ? And he went into just like pure, insane founder mode in like the best way possible. That spark led to a bunch of, you know, where we're at now with all these stats. And so what I tell companies is I can't help you with the nature part, but I can help you with the nurture side. ? And so I basically packaged all the ings of everything I learned from the assistant development. No code days, everything we've done at Zapier. . All the, you know, experiments and when people are like, well, how do we do that? And what do we do? I say there's three ways to answer that question. There's a personal level, a team level, and a company level answer to like the AI adoption problem, ? On the personal level, you've gotta spend time playing with these tools. in a non pressurized environment or you know, problems that no one's asking you to solve quite yet. But actually solve problems. Don't take courses, don't try to learn stuff. Only take courses or like look at tutorials when you come into that problem, So take a problem you're typically doing manually and like try to [00:25:00] solve it with AI to some degree. Very simple example, You're getting a lead coming into your inbox and you know, maybe you're going to chat GPT today to be like, okay, how do I write a personalized response to this person? Let me upload this company doc. Let me put in their information I got from that lead via slack. That lead notification. You know, let me maybe rewrite what the Rev ops team wrote for me in the, you know, email template, Based on this person, whatever. And then you paste that back in and you email that off to them. Well, in zapper you can orchestrate ai where we can take that lead form and as an AI step, we can take the information from there. Your prompt, any company doc, That's, you know, automatically synced and uploaded every time you know it changes and then be sending that out on your behalf. Or maybe putting a draft in your inbox and slacking you a link, that's like a really cool thing that like, you know, there's no pressure to solve that, but if you build that one thing, you're like ahead of like nine outta 10 people on, on like this ai kind of journey. And that's something just orchestrates. So this is a personal level. You gotta be playing with stuff. You gotta be building stuff. On the team level teams have to start appointing and usually it's like rev ops, sales ops more, it's like the ops people, right? But like, who are [00:26:00] your builders are gonna be building team wide builds. And on the company level there's gotta be some framework and, you know, plan to do this stuff because it can't just be top down and it can't just be bottoms up. Bottoms up, just turns into wild, wild west tops down, turns into a bunch of governance. And strategy and slide decks with no one actually end up doing anything. You need the lightning and you need the bottle and you need both of them to be meeting together. And the thing that sucks about that is it's gonna get a little messy, but that's good. Everyone always goes, well, if we give everyone AI at our company, it's gonna be a mess. I'm like, you should only be so lucky to have that problem. Jeff: Right. If, if you had everyone building and playing and, and trying to solve hard problems and applying themselves, yeah, it's gonna be a little zany for a little bit. Jeff: But I guarantee you a good portion of things are going to get a. Solved and, and you're gonna find a lot of time savings and yeah, you wasted a little bit of time, but maybe you'll waste, you know, what two units of time or, or Phil: I. Jeff: spend 10 units of time on it, but you're gonna gain back solving two of those problems in a really, really good way. It's probably gonna cover the other eight that you kinda just like failed at. Phil: And so for this audience, for your audience specifically, right? Like one of the things that we do in those trainings is [00:27:00] we sit with different teams, And we do like a whole 90 minute bootcamp with them. We take them from zero to one we help them build a zap. We help them build an agent. We help them build an AI step into that zap, and then also bring that agent back into that Zap, which is like a full agentic workflow. 'Cause at Zapper doesn't, we don't make you choose between agents or automations. You can actually get the best of both of them in one flow. And so, if we were sitting with, like with a product team. Some of the things that, you know, maybe maybe we would think about them is like, cool if you've got like a feedback form on the product, You know, a customer can submit some feedback. Maybe that's the trigger. And then the first action would be something like, you know, send that to an agent. Whose one job is to search all of your other feedback tickets, whatever, and see if there's anything related there, or any Slack conversations or you know, anything where like there's stuff related to that. Okay? Then bring in that context and the next step could be using AI step to take that research that the agent did and their feedback, and give you a structured output of how [00:28:00] you like to receive that feedback in the right channel, and maybe have that also look at some. Table in Google Sheets that says like, if it's about this, tag this person, if it's about this tag, this person, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then have that agent look at that table and then have it send that message to the right people in Slack and maybe also copy all of that and put it in your product board or whatever like that. That is like a great orchestrated workflow that like we could help a team build in, I don't know, like 20 minutes. Jeff: Right, and that the thing is it would save time. It would get the info to right people faster. It's probably not hard to do, but. The secrets you have to, you have to just go do it first. You have to try Phil: to do it. You've gotta play around. And we teach te this teams all the time. You've gotta get hands on with the tools. If you don't get hands on tools, you're never gonna learn what's possible. And that's why we believe in this last. Part about like the company rollout. We believe that every company we work with, Every single person intern to CEO has to get hands-on with the tool. If a company says to us, we only wanna do a centralized deployment of this stuff, we don't want anyone hands-on with the tool, and it's fine. If [00:29:00] they don't wanna like people long-term, everyone to be hands-on without some type of certification, but they don't want every person learning how to build AI and orchestrate ai, then we actually won't work with that company on the AI transformation front. It just goes against our belief on this thing. Like maybe there's other companies that like are more, like IT centric IPAs only that like, that's cool, go with them, man. But for us, we want everyone at your company to get hands on because at minimum we want them to be a human smoke detector for, you know, manual processes that shouldn't exist. And at best we want them to be a builder. Jeff: We have a pretty open policy here about it. We pretty much, we will expense almost anything around you trying tools and if you think it's gonna help you in your, your workflow, go for it and just expense it. You know, don't spend like a grand a month. Talk to someone first before you do that, but within reason. And people are pretty aware of what that is, but it's been interesting because I, I've gone and talked to, you know, people on the marketing team who are more junior or other teams and like, oh, hey, you could probably do this if you're doing this. And like, yeah, we already did. Here's, and they've walked me this in entire, like age agentic flow that they've built out. I'm like, oh, well. Keep it up. Well done. Because you let the people solve their, the, their thorny [00:30:00] problems and give 'em the room to do it. Yeah. beats momentum. I always say this, when the people who know the problem, the deepest get the aha moment with these tools, that's where the magic happens. And by the way, that aha moment's not gonna happen. Presenting your whole company a slide deck. It's not gonna happen in one. Phil: Like, Hey everybody, here's an enablement session for this new AI tool we have. It's gonna happen by getting hands on with small groups of people and actually having them build stuff. Jeff: I think you said something really interesting I wanna make sure people get left with, which is around agents you talked about, basically you have to think of them like. An intelligent, very eager intern. Jeff: And I, I found that just so often is, is almost any of these workflows, it's. A really concise not definition, but defining of steps and of what is good and bad. It's iterative. I, you know, maybe I'm not doing it right, but it's gotten me there where there's continued feedback loop of, of they get closer and closer and closer, but. I love the way you put it, like basically think about how you would onboard and train you know, interns. Yeah, Phil: people manager, you're gonna be terrible with agents Jeff: yeah. Well, it's fine. We have we have part of our product we call like an AI product [00:31:00] manager that looks across your whole product stack and all the, you know, inputs of like your session replay, your analytics, your dev tickets are getting shipped and customer feedback and, and basically uses all that to synthesize. From a, from a product team, what you need to look at that's important in your digital experience where people are falling down. And the biggest unlock we found in that was we have this step that basically call training the AI product manager or onboarding your A IPM. And it's literally how we're able to now teach them the, you know, information architecture, your site, the event structure, the, the network calls, all the important pieces. Phil: Engineering. I Jeff: Yeah. So we'll leave it at that. That people, you need to train your agents like you would an intern. Phil: I'll say this. Most people will start build. Agents are so easy to build, like use them with plain English. Now most people will start trying to build an agent and be like, this doesn't work. And they'll give a crappy prompted chapter sheet. People like this doesn't work. Write a social media post. And it's like, imagine you had an intern who was a Harvard, Harvard graduate, super smart, knew nothing about your business besides the name of your business and what your role was, and you just gave them a task. How would they perform it? [00:32:00] Right? Probably would be the same, but if you gave them a little bit of context. You said, this is what I want, this is what I don't want. Here's an example of what I like and I don't like. And then you actually sat with them for the first five times they did it and gave them feedback. You get a lot better of an output. Jeff: that's a good way of putting it. So, all right. If people want to follow up and try and sneak time or just ask questions or, or even just, you know, interact with you, 'cause you're a pretty fun guy. Is LinkedIn the best place to do it, Phil? Or Phil: Yeah, I live on LinkedIn. I love it there. It's my happy place. So LinkedIn and then also on LinkedIn, if you, I have like a, one of those action buttons like sign up for my newsletter or something on my. On my profile that is for, I have an SMS drop line where like once, twice a week I send out like SMS drops to my whole audience. Like, different conferences or events that are going on that I think are interesting. Sometimes do giveaways for like books. I'll do like, courses I find cool, but also just do like job listings or like, if you're looking for your next role, I'll promote you in it. You know what I mean? So, it's just like my kind of personal network. Jeff: Nice. I, I recommend it highly. I've learned a lot about AI and, and general other stuff from Phil here. So check it out. Phil Lincoln on LinkedIn. If you like the [00:33:00] podcast here, check us out too. Give us a follow whatever platform you're on. Just give us a follow, give us a like, write a review, , but most tell a friend, tell a colleague, like that's how we get the word out of this. And we can have more great things like having Phil on to talk about ai. Cool. Phil, thank you so much. Appreciate the time. It's great having you on. I'm gonna look you up when I'm in Atlanta in a couple weeks and yeah, hope hope to talk again. Yeah, dude. Let's do it. All right, bro. Thanks. Thank you so much. Phil: You too.