Zapier’s CMO on moving marketing teams from AI users to builders
Most marketing teams have figured out how to use AI. They’ve wired it into content workflows, tuned their prompts, and claimed the productivity wins. Dan Slagen, Chief Marketing and AI Transformation Officer at Zapier, says that phase is over.
The next one is harder, and no tool is going to do it for you.
“The next shift in AI is all about people, the way they work, and proving that by changing the way they work, the company and the people within the company will be better off quantitatively.” — Dan Slagen
Slagen is one of the main stage speakers at MAICON 2026. His session, “From AI Users to AI Builders: Leading Marketing Teams Into the Next Phase,” draws directly from what he ran inside Zapier’s own marketing org. What follows is a breakdown of that process.
The problem that hit at the end of 2025
When coding agents started becoming accessible to non-technical users late in 2025, the bar for AI competency shifted fast. Slagen’s team had strong instincts from the early adoption wave, but tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex introduced a different kind of demand.
“The bar to quickly become great with AI got much higher at the end of 2025 as we first started seeing more non-technical folks start using coding agents.” — Dan Slagen
The challenge wasn’t the technology itself. It was getting people over the first hump of unfamiliarity before they gave up.
The change management structure Slagen ran
He started with a demonstration, not a memo. Slagen brought in an external AI power user to show the team what was actually possible. The reaction was strong: people were stunned, confused, and in some cases upset.
“I’m not a fan of leading by fear, but every once in a while you need to make people understand how big this moment is, and this was one of those times,” Slagen said.
After the demonstration came structured support. Every team member got three weeks to learn a coding agent of their choice. Slagen designated five internal power users as marketing coaches, available around the clock during the onboarding period.
“I told the team that I’ll never know how many times they met with the marketing coaches, what questions they asked, how bad their first build was. My only ask was in three weeks you need to be ready to go.” — Dan Slagen
The three weeks ended with a two-week build-a-thon. Every marketer on the team built something. Outputs ranged from internal dashboards to fully functional products. Each person recorded a short video walkthrough of their build.
Slagen watched all of them, roughly 70 videos, and wrote a detailed, personalized response to each one.
The tiering system that came out of it
The build-a-thon surfaced something Slagen hadn’t engineered deliberately: the team self-sorted into three skill tiers based on what they produced.
“Our team sort of self-placed themselves in three tiers of skill level, but this allowed me to then work with each tier and give them new things to think about and solve where everyone felt like they could win, at least within their own tier, and advance forward,” Slagen said.
That tier structure became the basis for what came next, with different challenges and targets for each group rather than a single standard applied to everyone.
What Slagen will cover at MAICON 2026
His session is framed for leaders who are already past basic AI adoption and are working through the harder questions. Specifically, he plans to address:
- What the shift from using AI tools to building with them actually requires from leaders
- How non-technical teams can prepare for agentic workflows
- How to lead through this transition without waiting for a finished playbook
Attendees will see the internal Zapier transition from the inside, including the fear, confusion, and structural decisions that shaped it.
Who Slagen is
Slagen was selected by Forbes as a Top 50 Entrepreneurial CMO and recognized by TIME among its 100 most influential companies list. He’s been featured in The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, NPR, CNBC, BBC, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and TEDx. He authored “Understanding Start-Up CEOs” and teaches AI transformation at Scott Galloway’s Section School.
MAICON 2026 features Slagen alongside 50 or more other AI and business leaders.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.
Contact me at [email protected] for assistance.
