Zapier's CEO says AI agents save him two hours a day

Wade Foster, chief executive of Zapier, has built a set of AI agents that work through his week alongside him.

The agents brief him, draft his emails and, he says, argue with him.

Foster's account, given to Inc., is that the arrangement saves him about two hours a day and keeps his attention off low-value work.

Three practices are worth copying, and none of them require a bespoke model.

The first is the standing briefing. Rather than reading around a topic before a meeting, Foster has the material summarised for him automatically.

The second is drafting. Email is handed to an agent first and edited by the human second, which inverts the usual order.

The third is hiring. Foster runs what he calls a seven-agent hiring council, a panel of agents rather than a single assistant applied to candidate decisions.

How the council is structured, what each agent does and how its output feeds into an actual offer have not been detailed publicly.

Nor is there an independent measure of the two hours. It is a chief executive's estimate of his own calendar, and it should be read as one.

The transferable point is narrower than the headline number. Foster has not automated judgement; he has automated the reading, the first draft and the initial screen that precede it.

For a founder, the test is whether the same three slots exist in your week, and whether anyone would notice if software filled them first.

The cost of finding out is one week of drafts you then rewrite.

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