Zapier as Capability Provider or Orchestrator
Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier, on Zapier's LLM-powered future
The strategic risk is not that OpenAI replaces Zapier’s pipes, but that it captures the user relationship while Zapier supplies the plumbing underneath. Zapier’s own product direction shows it understands this clearly. The NLA API was built so any chat product can call Zapier’s actions through plain language, but Zapier has kept pushing toward owning setup, trust, and ongoing workflow design because that is where product learning, pricing power, and brand loyalty live.
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Zapier already tested the capability provider role. Its NLA API lets outside chat products turn a natural language request into an authenticated action across thousands of apps, with Zapier handling parameter mapping, auth, and response cleanup behind the scenes. That makes Zapier useful inside OpenAI, Slack, Discord, or any other interface, but also makes it easier for another company to sit between Zapier and the end user.
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The stronger defense is that automation is not just one API call. Zapier’s long term advantage is in the messy parts, deciding which apps connect, what steps run in what order, where humans approve actions, and how to make unreliable AI outputs safe enough for business workflows. That is why the company keeps framing the future as orchestration, not just chat plugins.
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This also fits Zapier’s broader history. The company grew by being the neutral layer across fragmented SaaS tools, and by 2023 it was estimated at about $310M in revenue with a large installed base of connected accounts. That scale gives it a reason to fight for its own front end, because becoming a hidden supplier would compress it toward infrastructure economics rather than software product economics.
The likely direction is a split model where Zapier powers actions inside major AI interfaces while building its own higher level orchestration layer on top. As agents spread across more apps and more specialized models, the winners will be the companies that own both the connections and the workflow logic. That is the path that keeps Zapier from being reduced to a background utility.