How Zapier’s EA built an army of AI interns to automate meeting prep, strengthen team culture, and scale internal alignment | Cortney Hickey

December 15, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

🎙️ The Voices & The Context

The Format: This interview-style podcast episode dives into practical AI applications for executive assistants, showcasing live demos of workflows at Zapier to demonstrate scalable productivity gains in a practical, demonstrative, and enthusiastic tone.
The Format: This is an interview.
The Key Players:
- Guest: Courtney Hickey – Executive Assistant to Zapier's CEO, renowned for pioneering AI automations that handle admin drudgery, reinforce company culture, and enable org-wide efficiency, turning her role into a high-leverage force multiplier.

🗝️ Key Themes & Topics

The episode explores AI's transformative role for EAs, focusing on automating repetitive tasks, embedding cultural norms, and scaling executive insight across teams through custom agents, GPTs, and knowledge bases.

Topic 1: Weekly Meeting Prep Agent – Courtney demos a Zapier Agent that scans calendars, researches attendees via web/CRM/Slack/email, generates to-do tasks, and delivers Slack digests with prep insights, evolving from basic to intelligent over time for stress-free planning.
Topic 2: Automated Meeting Feedback & Culture Reinforcement – Using Fellow AI note-taking, an agent analyzes transcripts against Zapier's values (e.g., Five Dysfunctions of a Team), delivering direct, balanced feedback to participants via Slack to normali

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Courtney Hickey**
2 (03:00) **Why Courtney Embraces AI as an EA**
3 (04:30) **Weekly Meeting Prep Agent in Zapier Agents**
4 (14:00) **Agent Iteration and Scaling Tips**
5 (17:30) **Calendar Optimization Extension**
6 (18:20) **Post-Meeting Feedback and Culture Coaching Agent**
7 (24:00) **Reinforcing Company Culture at Scale**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Cortney Hickey is the executive assistant to the CEO at Zapier, where she’s leveraging AI to transform traditional EA responsibilities into scalable, organization-wide systems. In this episode, she demonstrates how she’s built AI workflows that automate meeting preparation, reinforce company culture through automated feedback, and democratize strategic knowledge across the organization. Her approach shows how EAs can use AI not to replace their roles but to elevate them—working on higher-impact initiatives while creating systems that benefit the entire company.

What you’ll learn:

How to build an automated meeting prep system that researches participants, checks CRM data, and delivers actionable insights before important meetings
A framework for creating AI-powered culture reinforcement through automated meeting feedback aligned with company values and operating principles
How to develop an AI-powered document review system that helps teams align with executive expectations before formal reviews
A strategy for creating a centralized knowledge base that makes company strategy accessible and interactive for all employees
Why “progress over perfection” is the key mindset for building effective AI workflows that evolve over time
How EAs can use AI automation to work themselves out of repetitive tasks and into higher-impact strategic roles

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Cortney

(02:48) Overview of meeting prep automation with Zapier Agents

(04:43) How the meeting prep agent works

(10:21) An example of the meeting prep agent in practice

(12:16) Creating a culture reinforcement system through meeting feedback

(15:45) EAs’ unique position to leverage these tools