#231: How Zapier Is Building an AI Marketing Brain

Zapier's Chief Marketing and AI Transformation Officer Dan Slagen called a "code red" on his own marketing team, not because they were behind, but because he saw the bar moving from using AI to building with it.

In this AI Transformations episode, Slagen tells Mike Kaput how Zapier moved from AI adoption to AI-native work: three tiers of builders, an AI-powered "marketing brain," the "lossless marketing" idea behind it, and why working in public mattered more than any single tool.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:50 — Who Dan Slagen is and why Zapier's marketing story matters

00:06:12 — The February “code red”: what changed and why Dan called it

00:10:53 — How the team actually adopted AI

00:12:05 — Building Zapier's AI-powered marketing brain and “lossless marketing”

00:15:52 — Bringing in agentic expertise and charting the steps

00:21:25 — The behavioral side: how people interact with the machines

00:23:25 — How the average marketer connects to the central brain