How Zapier’s EA built an army of AI interns to automate meeting prep, strengthen team culture, and scale internal alignment | Cortney Hickey

What It Covers

Cortney Hickey, EA to Zapier's CEO, demonstrates how she built AI agents to automate meeting preparation, enforce company cultural values through automated feedback, and scale strategic alignment across the organization.

Key Questions Answered

• •Weekly Meeting Prep Agent: Automated Friday workflow researches external meeting participants via web search, checks CRM relationships in HubSpot, scans Gmail and Slack history, then creates Todoist tasks two hours before meetings and delivers structured Slack digest with prep recommendations.
• •Automated Meeting Feedback System: Post-meeting agent analyzes transcripts against company values and Five Dysfunctions of a Team framework, sends direct Slack feedback to all participants highlighting one to two growth opportunities, normalizing continuous feedback without ego threat from human managers.
• •Executive Prep GPT: Custom ChatGPT trained on company strategy memos, team norms, and past feedback helps employees stress-test documents before executive review, resulting in 278 users sharpening strategy docs, reducing meeting bottlenecks, and sometimes eliminating meetings entirely when clarity is achieved.
• •Strategy Companion in NotebookLM: Knowledge base containing dozens of sources including strategy documents, all-hands transcripts, and org action plans allows employees to query how their role connects to company strategy, with auto-generated podcast summaries making strategy interactive rather than static.