Agent Cambrian Explosion Favors Orchestrators
Wade Foster, co-founder & CEO of Zapier, on AI agent orchestration
The key implication is that agent growth favors the company that sits between specialized tools, not the company trying to be the tool itself. Zapier is arguing that agents will multiply the way SaaS apps did, but with even messier handoffs across models, data sources, permissions, and workflows. In that world, value shifts to the layer that decides which system acts, what context it gets, and what happens next.
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Zapier already built its business around long tail interoperability, with 8,000 app connections and admin controls over which apps and actions can run. MCP extends that logic from app to app automation into agent to agent coordination, where security and permissioning become even more important.
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The practical workflow is not one super agent doing everything. It is more like, pull a Gong transcript, fetch Salesforce fields, add web and enrichment data, send the package to an LLM for scoring or drafting, then route the result into Slack, email, or a database. That is orchestration, and it is mostly plumbing plus guardrails.
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This also explains why platforms like Zapier and n8n keep getting pulled forward by AI instead of displaced by it. As more teams spin up narrow agents and connect their own data, the hard part becomes chaining tools together reliably, turning recurring use cases into reusable templates, and keeping humans in the loop where mistakes matter.
Going forward, the winners in agents are likely to look less like standalone copilots and more like operating systems for work. The category should expand from simple chat assistants into background processes that watch systems, gather context, take actions, and hand off to other agents. That makes orchestration, governance, and reusable workflow design the control points of the market.