AI-powered workflow automation with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop

okay up next we have found our demos Mike from zappier which rhymes with happier is uh is gonna show us a little bit of what they've been working on over at zapier hey everyone I'm Mike uh one of the co-founders of zapier uh thank you Sonia and Pat for inviting me back this year to uh show something new uh one year ago I was here we were launching our V1 of AI actions on zapier an API that sort of translates natural language into executed API calls and a bit of an update on that over the last year we've executed over half a million of those on behalf of our users and to date um we've been launching other tons of other stuff AI related on zapier and to date uh We've run over 50 million AI tasks on zapier uh if you're not familiar with zapier task is basically something that's completely automated in behalf it's completely hands off uh we've heard a lot about agents today and uh clearly is happening uh in fact a lot of it's happening right now on zapier these are totally 100% automated um a lot of those 50 million tasks uh are using zapier classic look something like this this is sort of a canvas view right this is usually how people set up and build zaps lots of structure there's a high degree of learning there's a big learning curve lots of configuration nitty-gritty stuff you got to get right and as a result this sort of puts a huge sort of uh depression on the amount of people who can successfully use an adopt zapier so that's what I've been working on the last six months uh excited to give you all uh one of the first public previews of a new product called AI Bots inside of zapier central is the name of the product and this is a sort of groundup reimagining of what we're calling uh AI automation entire goal is to help more people in the world be able to successfully use figure out discover and actually adopt uh automation using AI so let's show a demo of this thing um right now that you probably looks pretty familiar you know standard chapy you can instead of come in here and say hello and it will talk back to me doesn't do anything right now this is sort of a blank slate um bot so let's customize it we're going to uh build a a new Behavior behaviors are how you sort of customize what these AI Bots can do on your behalf um now these Bots can you can customize them to like sort of change the behavior when you talk to them but I think a more cool thing to show off something more new in novel is uh how to control this bot doing stuff on your behalf in the background even when you're sort of away from your computer so I'm going to take a second to type in a quick prompt I have prepared maybe we do this all right so let's do schedule every morning get the list of today's meetings on my gcal summarize find short bullets emojis send the summary to me and slack and uh we'll do this add a fun automation inspired quote at the end and all right lots of typos but you all know that's uh resilient to that so here we've got the um bot starting to suggest uh how to automate this so in this case we're going to use this uh suggested uh schedule trigger can to happen every day every morning uh let's say sure you know 5 am. early riser and we'll add that as a trigger uh and now what we're going to do is we're going to equip this uh aiot with a set of available actions so you're the way to think about this is you're sort of giving this AI bot permission to act on your behalf and things in the real world uh for this use case the two that got suggested are relevant we're going to do this Google Calendar find event we wanted to be able to find all of the calendar events and I'm going to actually choose a specific calendar uh we'll come back and I'll actually talk a little bit more about this in a minute We'll add that and then we want it to be able to send a sock message in this case let's not do Channel message we'll do direct message to me got that and then here I'm also going to choose a specific value for me and slack and or add that and we're all set all right this bot's set up it's done I can turn on and it will work tomorrow morning but if you're like most users who use app you like to test things and make sure that they work the way they do so we'll goe and click test behavior and this is kind of the one of the first cool things is um we kind of introduced this concept of threading which is how to kind of group context together for a single um like task that the uh bot is is doing I'll try to pull this guy over is this legible I can also zoom in a little bit there we go a little more um so there we go went ahead and pulled off my calendar it's giving me a preview what it's going to retrieve and that all looks good so we'll say yep that looks good go ahead now one of the uh cool things about this spot while this is sort of processing here is um you notice how you like sort of picked certain values for the calendar and the slack so that's not required one of the things these Bots do out of the box is they will sort of guess everything right this takes advantage of a lot of the AI actions technology we built over the last year um the Box they will try to infer and guess and do things completely unprompted zero shot um however one of the things we learned uh from real users is uh that doesn't always work uh oftentimes you want a degree of control over how the bot actually makes its decisions in order to increase the sort of scope of use cases I think one interesting thing that I I found is like not every user needs that though there's actually a lot of use cases where you might just say be fine with sort of these Bots you know making decisions completely autonomously on your behalf um but there are a lot of use cases and it it's sort of opens up the the amount of use cases you can do if um you can the users can get sort of more determinist to control over how the bot makes decisions and what it does um all right so that looks like a good calendar event sure let's go ahead and say go it does like to check in a lot so that's on our road mapap to tune that down um other sort of fun surprises I think that we've learned from these AI Bots frankly we're still learning a lot about what these Bots sort of can do there's a lot of cool like latent capabilities built in um one that I've seen I think Andrew mentioned this morning there's a lot of self-healing capabilities uh you know these are sort of hooked up in those like agentic Loops so we've been able to observe like you the bot running into dealing with things that classically would just break zaps because they're sort of super rigid right like if you had a workflow hooked up to a Google spreadsheet and somebody came in your team and they Chang the name of the column in the spreadsheet uh classically like a zap would just break it'd be stuck um you know you'd get an eror email you'd have to come back and like completely debug it uh and figure out like well what what happened here um and you also have to go through the entire learning curve of how to learn learn automation how to learn reading structured that canvas view in order to figure it out and one of the cool things with these natural language systems is they can sort of debug automatically and sort of Loop and fix it for you all right so this is uh giving us a preview of The Message let's take a quick look at that uh there are a couple links in here those don't actually look quite right though those don't look like they're slack formatted uh I think those they're rendering nicely but I just from experience I know that's not the slack link format so let's go ahead and tell it to uh can you use the slack message formatting let that get done oh here's our automation quote automation is like a good cup of coffee wakes you up with the possibilities of the day uh all right can you use slack message forming we'll give that uh one more step and see if this is able to uh take our feedback which by the way this is also another very important part of uh what we found from users is they want to give these Bots a feedback and say hey you did this good you did this bad here's how to fix it and correct it one of the cool things is these Bots can actually learn from the feedback instructions in order to update how they run in the future so you can see this one actually choosing to use a tool called updating instructions so this is going to take my feedback that I actually gave it feed it back into the sort of instruction so the next time when this is running live and sort of uh completely autonomously it's able to use that instruction to uh to actually work one other uh maybe fun uh bit of trivia why name these things Bots um when we were uh looking at some of our usage data of zapier classic over the last 10 years uh one of the major themes that we saw is people tend to call their zaps Bots uh over Mill like over a million people have named their zaps with the word bot in it so uh we decided to steal that name too it seemed like a pretty good one it seems like a very cial way to refer to what these systems are okay those uh links all look much better that's using the right formatting there yep all right and the very last step hopefully is going to be yes and go can talk a little bit about the road map while we're waiting for this one to complete um I think one of the uh biggest lessons learned we've been getting real feedback from on this stuff is how much consistency and reliability matter for AI automation um one of the big feedback learnings we're seeing is you like I think I showed it to you in the thread where kind of give feedback to the bot natural language this is one of the biggest sort of of themes and Trends we're seeing with how users want to interact with these systems is they they almost think about these individual Bots as their own individualized like training um so the way they give them feedback when they give them thumbs up when they give them thumbs down when they type them feedback uh there's a very strong perception that like hey I'm sort of making my individual instance of the software significantly better um so that's one of the big things on our red map over the next couple weeks is to be able to incorporate and take all of that feedback and actually make these things better online and there we go it sent did it show up slackbot render the links a little bit funny but there we go zapier system from 218 um okay so that is a very quick look oh let me let's see if I go back to the behavior and pop it open uh there we go so you can see here at the end use the slack message formatting summary for sent to the user is that sort of updating process where the Bots are able to incorporate feedback right back into their instructions um so that's zappier AI bots on a nutshell I think one of the cool things is I just showed a demo with two apps on zapier but obviously the magic of zapier is we support uh what's the number now over 7,000 Integrations on zapier and zapier Central works with all 7,000 out of the box so you can sort of connect any par wise combination you want uh or even have these Bots do multiple actions uh at once uh this is I not a fan or believer in wait lists so this is available today you can go to central. zapier.com and log in with an existing zapier account or sign up for a new free zapier account and give it a go and excited to see uh what you all build with zapier's new aots thank [Applause] you

Channel: Sequoia Capital

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Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024