HR has rarely been more important than in the AI era, says Zapier’s Chief People & AI Transformation Officer

AI is not like other technologies that have come into the workforce: “the change that AI represents is much more like the introduction of the internet, than any other piece of software”.

This means that with AI, “yes it’s about tools, frameworks and governance,” but the true opportunity comes from being resilient and having strong muscles for change – that’s according to Zapier’s Brandon Sammut.

He adds: “These are the things that leadership teams and boards have always counted on from their Chief People Officers.”

That’s why software and automation company Zapier decided to add AI transformation to the remit Sammut, its Chief People Officer, at the end of 2025.

At UNLEASH America 2026, Sammut sat down for an exclusive interview with UNLEASH to explore why the AI’s disruption of the world of work presents a huge opportunity for HR, as well as how Zapier is leveraging the People’s team expertise to drive successful AI-led transformation.

What decisions do organizations, and HR teams specifically, need to be making to thrive in this age of AI?

AI has made the People team more important

Sammut is clear that “the People function has rarely been more important…a lot of things we’re trained in or have deep experience doing are more important now,” such as workforce planning, change management, leadership and development.

“There were things that it was hard to get any management team interested in pre-the AI era. Now, all of a sudden, the opportunity and challenge in front of leadership teams is so obvious,” he explains.

“People are confused, people are afraid, people are resisting where we’re trying to take them – we need to be really good at guiding the team through all the change. ”

“AI is new, but the rest of the equation, HR has been doing for a very long time,” Sammut tells UNLEASH.

This explains why it was intuitive at Zapier for Sammut, as Chief People Officer, to lead the AI transformation work.

“The range of things the People team is accountable in the organization has definitely gotten larger,” notes Sammut of the expanded remit.

Rather than adding new roles to the People team, or changing job titles, the biggest change has been rethinking how HR works.

HR is now “asking every team to reimagine how work gets done with AI,” he adds.

Brandon Sammut, Chief People & AI Transformation Officer, Zapier.

What we’re seeing is you can’t get meaningful improvements in efficiency and quality without redesigning what the humans are doing.”

“Just layering AI over the work as humans have always done it, you get modest benefit,” whereas by redesigning work in the age of AI to be “less toil, more meaning, more time with customers and stakeholders, more creative work, less drudgery,” you genuinely level up the outcomes.

Every time Zapier workers are re-designing their work, “they have to answer to our three-point framework of efficiency, quality and employee experience – how is this way of working scope or designed to make improvement in all three areas.”

Ultimately, successful work design is “a leadership and culture thing – the AI did not improve the experience, the way people led through the old way of working to a new way of working was so impactful that it led to this meaningful improvement in experience.”

Sammut shares that Zapier is already seeing results – for example, the customer support team “answers tickets materially faster than they used to, with higher customer satisfaction,” and, importantly, employee engagement scores are up to 30 points higher.

For Sammut, to ask every team to redesign how they work, HR itself “needs to be out front guiding the work,” and leading by example.

“We need to be seeing around corners, rather than pushing other people around them,” Sammut tells UNLEASH.

However, “we’re not telling teams what to do, we’re supporting and enabling” – the teams themselves are driving the work redesign.

To support this work, Zapier introduced a new role: an AI automation engineer. There are five across the company, but, in the spirit of HR leading by example, the first one was in the People team.

The role of the AI automation engineer “is to help teams take their ideas for how AI can improve outcomes, and help them make it a reality.”

Importantly for Sammut, when staffing the AI automation engineer role in the People team, “we did that from within our team” because “they have existing HR subject matter expertise.”

This is “one of the ways that we get to show the organization something we want to be true. There will be plenty of disruption in the range of jobs we have at the company, but we’re going to be betting on the talent we have today.”

Sammut tells UNLEASH that “we have added no new headcount to staff our AI transformation” – not just in HR, but across the whole business. “We have moved no reporting lines; that was a very intentional decision.”

This is where HR being accountable for AI transformation at Zapier is important – “it is especially intuitive to a HR leader about the sharp edges of using the org chat.”

“HR people spend time in org charts. They see through trial, error and experience the limitations of org design.” With the current AI disruption of work, it’s important to not “jump to org design to try and make a big new thing happen.”

Should you, as a HR leader, lead AI transformation?

While it makes sense for HR to lead the AI transformation at Zapier, Sammut doesn’t believe organizations need to be “super precious about whether it has to be the HR leader, the IT leaders, the CEO or someone else” leading the way.

What is important, however, is that “it’s a single person” who is responsible and accountable for AI within organizations. That person needs “sponsorship” from the CEO and board: “no-one can take the crown on their own – they must be given it.”

“Whoever that person is, one of things that will make them effective is that they have experience” in one of two sides of the AI coin. One is the CIO, CTO skill set, the other is the CPO skill set.

Importantly, this person then acts as “the conductor of an orchestra” in order to drive AI progress. For Sammut, “the People organization needs to be right in the middle of the scrum” of that orchestral work.

Sammut’s advice to leaders, in HR and outside, who are struggling with ownership of AI transformation is “no organization is starting from scratch.”

“Even for organizations that feel far behind, there actually isn’t as much distance between those that look far ahead and those that aren’t. Given how early we are with AI, it doesn’t take that much to catch up.”

As inspiration for HR teams on the potential of AI to truly transform their workforces and businesses, UNLEASH asked Sammut about Zapier’s HR and AI plans for the rest of the year.

The HR team has tasked every department at Zapier – of which there are 11 – to ship one significant new way of working with AI every quarter of 2026.

“That’s at least 44 case study-worthy new ways of working with AI this year,” in addition to the AI ‘digital twin’ that every Zapier employee was tasked with building in Q1 2026.

HR’s job is to “make sure that teams have the guidance, the insights, the support to really nail the talent and culture pieces of those equations.”

The next challenge for Zapier, Sammut admits, is to move from individual to collective productivity with AI – something that Microsoft Chief Scientist, Jaime Teevan, spoke about on the UNLEASH America Main Stage and in an exclusive UNLEASH interview.

“Many organizations, even Zapier, are going to start hitting the ceiling on getting value from AI because they’re not thinking about institutional AI” – the mentality is still, I built something with AI, “but no-one else knows.”