Zapier Lead AI PM Reid Robinson

How AI Happens

Key Points From This Episode:

• Reid Robinson's professional background, and how he ended up at Zapier.
• What he learned during his year as an NFT founder, and how it serves him in his work today.
• How he gained his diverse array of professional skills.
• Whether one can differentiate between AI and mere automation.
• How Reid knew that partnering with OpenAI and ChatGPT would be the perfect fit.
• The way the Zapier team understands and approaches ML accuracy and generative data.
• Why real-world data is better as it stands, and whether generative data will one day catch up.
• How Zapier uses generative data with its clients.
• Why AI is still mostly beneficial for those with a technical background.
• Reid Robinson's next big idea, and his parting words of advice.

Quotes:

“Sometimes, people are very bad at asking for what they want. If you do any stint in, particularly, the more hardcore sales jobs out there, it's one of the things you're going to have to learn how to do to survive. You have to be uncomfortable and learn how to ask for things.” — @Reidoutloud_ [0:05:07]

“In order to really start to drive the accuracy of [our AI models], we needed to understand, what were users trying to do with this?” — @Reidoutloud_ [0:15:34]

“The people who being enabled the most with AI in the current stage are the technical tinkerers. I think a lot of these tools are too technical for average-knowledge workers.” — @Reidoutloud_ [0:28:32]

“Quick advice for anyone listening to this, do not start a company when you have your first kid! Horrible idea.” — @Reidoutloud_ [0:29:28]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Reid Robinson on LinkedIn

Reid Robinson on X

Zapier

CocoNFT

How AI Happens

Sama