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As a learning designer at Zapier, I used to spend my days helping my teammates learn: I built and led trainings, created enablement resources, and helped folks better understand how their work contributed to company strategy. Now, I sit inside our HR team as an AI automation engineer. But the through line is the same: I still help my teammates (and now customers, too!) do their best work. What is an AI automation engineer? AI automation engineer sounds like a vague title, so here’s the job, plainly: I embed with a team (HR, in my case), spot opportunities to enhance the team’s work, and build AI-powered workflows that jump on those opportunities. The goal is to create measurable improvements that free my teammates up for creativity, strategy, and connection. I think we’ll be seeing this title pop up more and more as time goes on. For example, instead of hiring a new content writer, content marketing teams might look for AI automation engineers with a strong eye for content. Instead of a new junior coder, engineering teams might look for an AI automation engineer with a technical background. Why the AI automation engineer role matters Lots of teams see AI’s potential but get stuck turning ideas into action. The gap is less about technology and more about translation: understanding how a real process works today, where it fails, what data is safe to use, and what “better” even looks like. AI automation engineers close that gap. We prototype fast using tools like Zapier, ChatGPT, Airtable, and Cursor, then we harden those prototypes into reliable internal tools. In HR, that looks like: Reducing the back-and-forth between recruiting, interviewers, and candidates Auto-summarizing interview debriefs so we can make decisions faster Keeping people data in sync across tools, with the right guardrails for privacy and compliance Giving folks self-serve answers to policy questions without losing the human touch And it is not just about helping my own team. A big part of my role is building repeatable HR workflows that we can share with our customers. When I design something for Zapiers people team, like an interview debrief summarizer or a self-serve policy bot, I’m also thinking about how it could work for other HR teams out in the world. Sometimes it even goes the other way: a customer use case inspires a workflow that we bring back inside Zapier. What I actually do week to week as an AI automation engineer AI automation engineer is a new type of role, and I’m even newer to it myself, but here’s a glimpse into how I spend my days. Triage workflows: I map how work really happens, quantify the cost of the current process, then rank opportunities. I’m looking for spots where I can have a big impact. Prototype quickly: Once I know where I want to help, I build small, testable versions using Zapier and other AI tools. Embed with the team: I sit with the people doing the work. We try the prototype in the real flow and adjust prompts and logic. We document what to trust and when to escalate to a human. Scale the AI automation: Once the workflow proves itself, I add error handling, retries, observability, and access controls. I create a runbook so the team can own it, not me. Teach and enable: I host short workshops, write playbooks, and pair with team leads so they can spot the next opportunity themselves (and know when not to use AI). Measure outcomes: I track hours saved, error rate reduction, cycle-time improvements, adoption, and the business outcome (e.g., faster time-to-hire, better candidate experience). Partner with sales: When we see an HR workflow that really moves the needle, I package it into a demo or playbook that our sales team can share with prospects. Sometimes I join those conversations directly to explain the workflow in plain language: why it works, what problems it solves, and what business results it drives. Share feedback upstream: Because I’m building on top of Zapier and AI tools every day, I run into edge cases, missing features, or things that could be smoother. I funnel that feedback back to our product team, often with concrete examples from both our people team and customers. It means the next version of Zapier is more aligned with how real HR teams actually work. For some examples of what I’ve built, read about my favorite agents or take a look at our HR AI automation playbook. What does it take to be an AI automation engineer? I don’t come from a technical background, but I’m a tinkerer, and I think that’s what makes me suited for this role. I’m comfortable building with no-code tools and love to ship solutions. Skills I’ve picked up along the way are prompt engineering, responsible AI practices, and understanding how to pick the right AI tools for the job. One of the most important parts of the role, though, is something I have a lot of experience with: enablement. I need to make sure the folks I’m building for understand how to make the most of these systems. One important thing to note: My focus is squarely on HR. That’s where I build, prototype, and enable. While I love seeing how AI automation engineers show up in marketing, IT, or engineering, my role is all about HR use cases. I help our people team work smarter, and I help our customers run stronger HR operations. But I’m also proof that you don’t need to be a software engineer to become an AI automation engineer. Here are some other folks from the Zapier community who I’d argue are AI automation engineers, each from a different background. Remote’s Marcus Saito (head of IT) used AI to auto-resolve 27.5% of IT tickets. This saved his team more than 2,200 days and $500,000 in hiring costs. Vendasta’s Jacob Sirrs (marketing operations specialist) used AI to automate sales workflows, save more than 282 workdays a year, and reclaim $1 million in revenue. ActiveCampaign’s Tabitha Jordan (manager of product education) implemented AI-powered lead enrichment to give the sales teams time to focus on high-value activities. Moving from learning & development into this roleas an AI automation engineer for HR hasn’t changed my mission. I still help people work better. If you’re AI-curious, start with the smallest annoying task you do every week. Fix that. Measure it. Then fix the next one.
Category:
E-Commerce
Long Beach Airport had a trailer problem. Long Beach’s quaint municipal airport originally opened in 1924 when airplanes flew using propellersand the art deco terminal hadn’t undergone a full-scale renovation since. Instead, it adapted to the increased spatial demands of late 20th and early 21st century air travel, like increased security screening and modern baggage handling, in a rather temporary way: trailers. “It was known as the trailer park airport,” says Michael Bohn, a partner at Studio One Eleven, a Long Beach-based architecture and design firm. “It just became a hodgepodge. You went down these crazy aisles, and through different trailers. They had vending machines for snacks. It was probably one of the worst experiences you could have.” In 2012, the city decided to do something about that. It launched a multiphase, $185 million renovation project. Two new concourse buildings were added, making it more feasible for the airport to handle passengers for major airlines like Southwest and JetBlue. Concessions were expanded. A new welcome gateway was added. It was all intended to reset the airport in the public’s mind, moving it away from its jumbled past to becoming a more seamless gateway for traveler opting against the nearby behemoth of Los Angeles International Airport. But the trailers were still making up key parts of the airport’s operations. [Photo: courtesy Studio One Eleven] “Trailer park airport” no more Studio One Eleven stepped in to rethink the space around the main terminal building and to do away with the trailers once and for all. The firm led the historic renovation and seismic upgrading of the terminal building, designed in a streamlined style and adorned with WPA-era artwork. The project also included a large-scale enhancement of the terminal’s public realm, much of which had been taken over by trailers and other ad hoc building annexes and airport infrastructure. [Photo: courtesy Studio One Eleven] “We said, ‘what if you could pull this stuff away and create a negative space instead of all this clutter?'” says Kirk Keller, principal landscape architect at Studio One Eleven. The designers moved IT equipment into the basement, and relocated the baggage handling infrastructure behind the scenes. “It was really trying to carve away space for people.” [Photo: courtesy Studio One Eleven] That opened up new space for a more open terminal experience and, rarely for an airport, outdoor terrace space once passengers make their way through security. “We look at the space between buildings as being just as important as the architecture itself,” says Bohn. Their design interventions have gotten rid of the trailer park problem, and helped turn Long Beach Airport into one of the most beloved airports in the United States. A recent Washington Post ranking of the top 50 airports placed it as the second best in the nation, behind only Portland’s elegant new mass timber terminal. [Photo: courtesy Studio One Eleven] New outdoor space Outdoor space became a key focus for the project. Once holding the overflow services and equipment that created the airport’s trailer problem, space that exists between the historic terminal and the two new concourse buildings became ripe for reinvention. “It was almost just interstitial space between these two concourses. It served no purpose,” says Bohn. Studio One Eleven reframed the space as a central plaza. [Photo: courtesy Studio One Eleven] Set between the cruise ship-esque facade of the historic terminal and the modern facilities leading into the secure section of the airport, the plaza has become a unique public space in the city, where people can greet arriving friends and family, access one of the airport’s local concessionaires, or simply catch views of airplanes taking off and landing. [Photo: courtesy Studio One Eleven] To keep it as open as possible, the designers used the region’s iconic palm trees as both landscaping and lighting infrastructure, while also webbing the space with an overhead catenary wire system to hold additional exterior lights. Keller says they’re meant to evoke the flight paths of airplanes and seabirds from Long Beach’s coastal environment. Long Beach-based Studio One Eleven was tuned into these local influences. The designers also knew that one of the airport’s biggest strengths was its relatively modest size. “We were just respecting that Long Beach doesn’t want to try to compete with LAX or Portland, or San Francisco,” says Bohn. “It’s got its charm, and we just wanted to build on that.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Innovation hubs were once the darlings of corporate strategy, promising to future-proof businesses and spark breakthrough ideas. But two decades in, the cracks are showing. Too many hubs have struggled to prove their worth, and some have quietly shut down altogether. In reality, these costly spaces never lived up to the hypeand the future lies elsewhere. Rather than investing in shiny new labs, organizations should be cultivating innovation communities: networks of people, inside and outside the company, who collaborate around shared challenges and opportunities. Looking Back: Proliferation Innovation hubs have proliferated through private enterprise over the past two decades. This has largely happened because of broader cultural shifts, like the increasing pace of societal and technological change, and globalized competition, which made it imperative that organizations develop their own muscle to shape a leading edge. Companies proved this out through rather dependable profit cycles, which in turn created bandwidth for broader exploration. In fact, now innovation hubs are relatively commonplace: According to research by Indicative, more than 60% of financial services organizations in the U.S. have their own innovation hubs, whereas it is close to 40% for automotive and retail sectors. These hubs usually exist at varying scales in physical form, with a blend of core team and supporting organizers that lead events programming, project development, and stakeholder engagement. Some of these hubs choose to stay close to the core business, be it adjacent to production facilities or headquarters, like BMWs Project i-Ventures. Their proximity enables an effortless flow of people and ideas from the core business. Other organizations opt for the periphery, both in terms of location and thematic focus, to develop their portfolio with less oversight, and potentially less distraction from the HQsuch as Google X and Pfizers Center for Therapeutic Innovation. For these latter hubs, the emphasis has been on bolder bets that could transform the business in longer time horizons. The way these hubs manifest their mission vary widely. Some stayed close to the core of product-service innovation, either via venture funding or intrapreneurship challenges. Others worked closer to brand differentiation and storytelling, or even positioned themselves as an employee-value-proposition (EVP) vessel. Within all of this, some have been incredibly refined in their form factor, whereas others opt for the messy maker approach. Independent from their form, the momentum around hubs served the purpose of bringing the innovation narrative to the boardroom. But were now in a broader reckoning moment in terms of what the path forward will be, with contraction and restructuring in businesses leaving the innovation hubs in question. And the closure of Ikeas innovation hub, Space10, and the struggles faced by giants like Walmart, underscore innovation hubs systemic issues around purpose, experience, positioning, and mandate. On top of that, its not easy to recount examples where an innovation hub actually turned a company around. An HBR article sourcing Capgemini shows that 90% of innovation hubs failed to deliver on their promise. This highlights a critical point: merely establishing innovation labs does not guarantee success. A company has to carefully craft the right innovation framework and align necessary resources to truly enable business outcomes through innovation, according to another Capgemini report. The Three Traps Innovation hubs are trapped in three sets of strategic tensions of their own making: positioning with respect to core business, the balance between product development and communications, and the balance between internal versus external partners. When hubs sit too far from the core business, they tend to drift into scattered activities without a clear focus or meaningful links back to the company. But when they sit too close, they get bogged down by corporate rigidity and lose the agility needed to make real progress. In terms of activity, hubs focusing on tangible product-service innovation struggled when early test versions or products did not gain tractioneither because there was focusing too much on desirability or viability, but not both. In other contexts, innovation hubs focused more on marketing, comms and storytellingand those may have had a boost in the early phases, but in absence of “tangible results,” the energy dissipated over time and was simply framed as innovation theater. Here, a good litmus test is the professional background of their Chief Innovation Officers (CIO)some directly come from product development backgrounds, and others from communications, but rarely bridging both. A third tension is whether the innovation system focused more on engaging the internal stakeholders in an organization, or engaged with external partners and ecosystem players. While the framing of open innovation is used abundantly, companies also struggled to break down the walls and let the partners in, given the competitive nature of the work. Although these tensions may come natural with any organization, what is clear is that there is a need for a new narrative for the value of Innovationespecially in the hyper-uncertain, post-COVID, recessionary, restructure- around-the-corner environment. [Image: Atölye] A New Configuration The provocation is to shift how we think about innovation, away from building more hubs as physical showcases, and toward reimagining how people, resources, and ideas connect across an organization. p>What if, instead of drawing hard lines between the hub and the business, we dissolved those boundaries and allowed innovation to flow more freely across teams and functions? What if the money spent on shiny new buildings went instead to cultivating relationships: creating open, community-powered networks where employees, partners, and even customers can contribute to problem-solving? What if, rather than building yet another lab, organizations took stock of what they already have (unused spaces, overlooked talent, dormant partnerships) and reconfigured them into living platforms for experimentation? And what if innovation became less about a central place, and more about distributed cohorts of changemakerssmall, empowered groups connected by digital and physical networks, supported with clear incentives to act? In its highly functioning version, this new path towards community-powered innovation could shift an organizations DNA across all four key dimensions: product innovation, talent, impact, and brand perception. Such refocusing would enable the discourse to move away from building physical assets to cultivating innovation communities, acknowledging the slow, arduous but ultimately differentiating act of investing in people and their relationships above all else. In practice, these communities are networks of employees, partners, and sometimes even customers who come together around shared challenges and opportunities. Rather than operating as a single close-knit team, they function as distributed groups that exchange ideas, test solutions, and build momentum across the organization. This strategy would not only preserve but potentially enhance previous investments, directing organizations toward a future where innovation is seamlessly integrated across the organization. Innovation & Sustainability as a Shared Agenda Such a narrative of distributed, community-powered innovation may sound compelling, but it isnt bold enough for structural change. For that, you need a bigger purposeand that is the convergence of the innovation and the sustainability narratives within organizations. Ultimately, the climate crisis is a key challenge that poses an essential risk, alongside massive opportunities. Climate defines a very compelling why and can deeply move people. Sustainability can act like a prism that refocuses dispersed efforts, tapping into the energy for key changemakers in organizations that are collaborative and intrinsically motivated, which is exactly the audience that any organization is keen to activate. Converging innovation and sustainability would also simplify the organizational structures that often create silos or duplicated efforts, making it easier for teams to work toward meaningful results together. In a world where Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and regulation may be taking over the story of sustainability, crafting strong shared narratives can unlock the path for deeper activation. Ultimately, we need to imagine a world in which each organization defines their why in relationship to sustainability, and their how in relationship to innovation communities. In that world, organizations powered by communities could move with newfound momentum to drive the changewhich is direly needed. Contributors: Özlem Tuskan, Leen Sadder, Gülnaz Ör, Mert Çetinkaya, Greg Csikos, Melissa Clissold
Category:
E-Commerce
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