Zapier's CEO called one on a Thursday night. Two years later, his Chief People Officer became his Chief AI Officer.
Wade Foster still remembers the Thursday night.
He told the story last week at AUTONOMOUS: OBSOLETE, Board of Innovation's conference on what becomes obsolete when AI rewrites how companies operate. And the Zapier CEO took us all back to spring 2023.
GPT-4 had just dropped. He was on a Zoom call with his two co-founders for two hours, and the only question was: what are we going to do with this?
ChatGPT had launched a few months earlier, and the Zapier team shared it in the general Slack channel the way you'd share any cool new product. Interesting. Worth a look. No mandates. GPT-4 was different. The improvement was massive. The cost curves were falling. And if you played it forward six months, then another six, the trajectory was obvious.
Wade called a code red. They didn't even have a concept for that internally. They just knew they needed to shake people and say: this is important.
Here's what they did next. A hackathon. Company-wide. Every role. HR, finance, sales, marketing, engineering. Everybody stops what they're doing and builds something with AI.
In one week, daily AI usage at Zapier went from 10% to over 50%.
That was the single most important thing they did. Hands on keyboards.
The companies that struggle most start with an AI committee. Leaders in a conference room dreaming up strategy. Six months later, no progress.
Wade was direct about what doesn't work. AI committees. Well-intentioned groups of leaders sitting in conference rooms, trying to dream up an end-to-end AI strategy before anyone has touched the tools. He's talked to companies that spent six months in that mode with nothing to show for it.
And here's what makes that observation so uncomfortable. Most companies did exactly that. If you're reading this newsletter, there's a good chance your organization's first move was to form a working group, appoint a committee, commission a landscape review. The instinct makes sense. This feels big and risky and you want to be thoughtful.
But thoughtful and slow are not the same thing. And the gap between "we're being strategic" and "we're stalling" is narrower than most leaders want to admit.
From hackathon to more agents than employees
What happened after the hackathon is the part that changes the conversation. People didn't stop building. They kept going. An accountant created a reconciliation agent. A marketer built a content workflow. The people ops team redesigned onboarding. It spread because it was useful, not because someone mandated it.
Pretty soon, Zapier had more AI agents than employees.
That's what happens when you give people tools and space. They build. You can't stop them. And you shouldn't want to.
But here's where it gets interesting. For two full years after the code red, Wade deliberately did not name anyone to lead AI transformation. On purpose. He worried that if one person owned it, everyone else would say "those are the AI people over there" and keep doing their jobs the same way.
He wanted 100% of the company to feel like AI was their job. And for two years, that worked.
Why the CPO became the CAO
Then it didn't. Not because adoption stalled. Because it succeeded. They had so many agents, so many workflows, so much happening across every function that the problem shifted. How do you identify the highest-ROI problems? How do you reorganize when the jobs themselves have changed? How do you rethink job families when an accountant can build their own agent?
When Wade looked around for who was best positioned to lead that next phase, the answer wasn't a technologist. It was Brandon, his Chief People Officer.
Brandon's team had moved the fastest. They'd redesigned how they worked more aggressively than any other function. And Wade realized that the skills the company needed next weren't technical. They were organizational. Change management. Culture. The sticky human problems that come after the adoption curve.
So he asked his CPO to become his Chief AI Officer.
Zapier isn't alone here. Moderna merged their CHRO with their CTO/CIO role. Other companies are following the same pattern. And I think it reveals something most organizations haven't confronted yet: the adoption problem is solved. The reorganization problem is just beginning.
I wrote about something connected to this earlier this year. In The Leader's Dilemma, I argued that your people aren't resisting AI. They're resisting ambiguity. And that's on you as a leader. The hackathon is how you start to solve for ambiguity. It puts tools in people's hands. It compresses the feedback loop between "I don't know what AI can do" and "I just built something with it." That loop is everything.
But the CPO-to-CAO move solves for the harder thing. Once everyone is building, someone has to rethink what the organization looks like now. Not "on the other side," because there is no other side. Right now. And that person needs to understand people, not just models.
Wade also said something about competition that I think applies to every company, not just software. The pace at which this space moves is unlike anything he's seen in 15 years. He called it a 10 out of 10 exciting time and a 10 out of 10 anxiety time at the same moment. And that tension is what I hear from every leader I talk to.
Here's what I take from Wade's story. The companies that are two years ahead started with a different first move. They built before they strategized. They distributed ownership instead of centralizing it. And when the real complexity hit, they put a people leader in charge.
Most companies are still working through the sequence backwards. Strategy first, tools second, people last. Zapier did it the other way around. People first, tools second, strategy last. And they're 15 years old, 700+ people, a real business with real revenue. A leadership move from a company with something to lose.
By the numbers
10% → 50%. Daily AI usage at Zapier after a single company-wide hackathon. One week. Every function. Hands on keyboards. The most important jumpstart in their AI journey was building.
More agents than employees. What happens when you give every person in the company tools and space to build. Organic. Self-directed. People just build because the advantages are too obvious to ignore.
2 years. How long Zapier deliberately avoided naming a single AI leader. The goal: make sure 100% of the company felt like AI was their responsibility, not one team's project. Then they named their Chief People Officer.
AUTONOMOUS: OBSOLETE · Zapier CEO Interview · May 2026
What to do this week
Wade made a distinction that I think applies to every organization. He described two types of companies. Permission-based, where you need approval before redesigning a workflow. And forgiveness-based, where you redesign first and deal with the consequences after.
My advice: figure out which one you're in. Then act accordingly.
If you're in a forgiveness-based org, stop waiting. Run a hackathon this month. Pick a day, clear calendars, give everyone access to Claude or ChatGPT or whatever tools you have, and let them build.
If you're in a permission-based org, you need air cover first. Find the leader who will back you. Then run the hackathon with their sponsorship. Wade had his CEO and his board behind the push. You need your version of that.
Either way, the pattern is the same. Building teaches faster than planning. And the companies that built first are now two years ahead of the companies that planned first.
From the portfolio
The gap between planning and building is where most transformations stall. And it's where both of these companies operate.
Board of Innovation hosted AUTONOMOUS: OBSOLETE, the summit where Wade shared this story. They're an AI Transformation Studio that helps mid-market and Fortune 500 companies close the gap between AI curiosity and organizational change. When Wade talks about the shift from adoption to reorganization, that's exactly the inflection point BOI helps companies navigate.
AlignAI is where the governance layer Wade described meets enterprise reality. He talked about managing who has access to what across an organization's AI deployments. Not just humans, but agents too. That's the problem AlignAI solves: structured refinement and approval so AI initiatives move from experiment to production without creating risk. They're also building an AI COE Collective in partnership with Slalom for leaders navigating this exact transition from adoption to reorganization. If you're building or scaling AI in your enterprise, you shouldn't be doing it alone.
Where I'll be next
May 28: 1871 Emerging Tech Innovation Summit (Chicago)
Chicago has always been a builder's city. Operators and founders who are actually shipping tell you what's working and what isn't. Demos from high-traction startups building in AI, blockchain, and quantum. And the hardest questions in emerging tech right now: what's real, what breaks at scale, and what's getting funded in a production-first market. If you're building or deploying in Chicago, this is the room. TGB readers can use code JHCOMP for complimentary registration at 1871.com.
Building teaches faster than planning. The companies that built first are now two years ahead of the companies that planned first.
Talk Tuesday,
Jason Hauer
Founder & CEO, HauerX Holdings
jason@hauerX.com
Jason Hauer is the founder and CEO of HauerX Holdings, where he backs and builds a portfolio of AI-native companies that accelerate how businesses grow, operate, and compete. From mid-market to Fortune 500.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Wade Foster call a code red at Zapier in 2023?
GPT-4 had just dropped. The improvement over what Zapier had been sharing casually in Slack was massive, cost curves were falling, and the trajectory was obvious. Wade wanted to shake people and say: this is important. Zapier didn't even have a concept for "code red" internally, they invented it for the moment.
What happened in the week after Zapier's company-wide hackathon?
Daily AI usage jumped from 10% to over 50% in a single week. Every role participated, from HR and finance to sales, marketing, and engineering. Hands on keyboards turned out to be the single most important jumpstart in Zapier's AI journey.
Why did Wade avoid naming an AI leader for two years?
He worried that if one person owned it, everyone else would say "those are the AI people over there" and keep doing their jobs the same way. He wanted 100% of the company to feel like AI was their job. For two years, that worked. Then the volume of agents and workflows made a coordination role necessary.
Why did Zapier turn its Chief People Officer into its Chief AI Officer?
The skills the company needed next weren't technical. They were organizational: change management, culture, and the sticky human problems that come after adoption. Brandon's people ops team had also moved the fastest and redesigned how they worked more aggressively than any other function. Moderna made a similar move, merging its CHRO with its CTO/CIO role.
What's the difference between a permission-based and a forgiveness-based organization?
In a permission-based org, you need approval before redesigning a workflow. In a forgiveness-based org, you redesign first and deal with the consequences after. Wade's advice: figure out which one you're in. If you're forgiveness-based, run a hackathon this month. If you're permission-based, find air cover from a senior leader first.
