Wade Foster
Founder and CEO of Zapier, the workflow automation company, who talks about AI agents, AI fluency in hiring and performance reviews, and running a distributed t...
“If the thing you fell in love with about engineering was this artisanal handwritten code portion of the job, and that's the thing that you yearn for, I got to be honest with you, I do think that's a bit of a relic.”
Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company · AI Builders · October 2026
Context
The Zapier CEO was describing how he talks to engineers worried their jobs are obsolete. He says engineering jobs are safe and openings are growing, but the job is turning into understanding customer problems and directing systems that write the software.
Transcript
…remind them of like, what are you experiencing with these tools? Like, what is the most positive thing you've experienced? What's the most negative thing you've experienced with these tools? And by and large, most people are like, yeah, this is actually pretty cool. This is pretty awesome stuff.
…But you also one day have to kind of say, well, I have a company to stew it and I want this to be successful. I want it to be successful for our customers, but I also want it to be able to pay everybody's salary and make them money. And that requires that we basically get excited and go east. Or
like a West. Let's use like a practical example of like what folks we see folks experiencing. So let's take engineers. You know, if you kind of survey the crop of like the engineering population, you won't have to go far to find folks who are like, is my job obsolete now? That sort of overhang exists. And, you know, I think you kind of got to be pretty honest with them about like how you sort of see the future existing. On one hand, like, I think engineering job is like very, very safe. The number of engineering job openings is growing. Very few people are actually getting laid off because of this. And so there's where you have your statistics. You can tell the Jensen, you know, radiologist one that he's out there talking about all the time. Like, you know, we convinced people that radiology was going on and it turns out actually we need more radiologists than ever. And now we have a radiology shortage. Like you can sort of tell that. But I do think you have to be honest that the job also is…
On the refounding stuff, and I have a billion questions for you. When you tell that story to the engineer, one of the issues I would imagine is that the job and the job specs and the organizational design that they sit within might be the limiting factor to unlock the energy that AI can kind of…
Yeah, I think that that's pretty true. You know, like an example I would give is we have an autonomous support email agent experience experiment that's running right now. And so, the way that that project has worked is, you know, we have a bunch of staff that has been hired over the years that…
Have you found places where the workflow now completely breaks? I'll give you an example. Let's say you apply for interns, you get a thousand applications because they use AI to write them. Then you come up with an AI system that reads all the applicants, and suddenly you're like, this was the…