Zapier Rebuilds Internal Awards Program Solo Using AI Building Tool in Two Weeks.

Rob Ayre, a product manager at Zapier, rebuilt the company's annual Zappy Awards program solo in two weeks using Zapier's AI building tool. The automation itself took just a few hours.

A program of this scale, Ayre wrote in a LinkedIn post, would typically require a project manager, a marketing ops person, two engineers, and a forms admin. He built it alone.

The rebuilt system includes:

• Two public submission forms with conditional logic and category routing, one for self-nominations and one for peer nominations
• A submissions table with 29 fields tracking status from new submission through review, shortlist, monthly winner, and annual winner
• Four automations handling self-nomination intake, peer-nomination intake, VideoAsk video linkback, and a daily nudge cron
• Automatic Slack thread creation under each submission for team reactions without leaving Slack
• Personal nudge emails on day three and day seven if the video isn't recorded
• A monthly winner cadence on top of the annual program to maintain momentum year-round
• An always-on dashboard accessible company-wide showing status and top weekly submissions

The new structure reflects what Ayre described as a shift in constraint. The question changed from "do we have the people" to "do we have the idea."

Peer nominations now exist because adding them required an afternoon, not a quarter of the roadmap. Monthly cadence became viable because spinning up a recurring shortlist is a status field change, not a new hire.

"Programs you would have killed for being too operational are now viable," Ayre wrote. "Programs you would have run once a year you can run every month."

The rebuild follows Zapier's broader push into AI-assisted automation. The company recently launched one-click integration to install automations into AI tools and redesigned its homepage to integrate with AI coding tools and agents. It also released the Zapier SDK in open beta, bringing 9,000-app automations to AI coding tools.

Ayre's case study demonstrates what those capabilities look like in practice. The cost of being customer-first, he noted, dropped to zero. Programs shelved for being too operational are now viable to revisit.

The 2026 Zappy Awards are now open for submissions. Zapier users can self-nominate or nominate team members.