Meet the primary Zappy Award month-to-month winners

We launched the Zappy Awards in Might to search out the builders quietly redesigning how work will get accomplished at their firms. We’re on the hunt for the individuals who see an issue, decide up Zapier, and do one thing about it.

We have hit 50 submissions. We weren’t anticipating the bar to be this excessive this quick. So we have determined to maneuver up our first month-to-month wins to begin proper now!

These are the primary two month-to-month winners.

Rachael Silvano, Group Technique Lead at Articulate

Rachael manages E-Studying Heroes, a group with 140,000 lively members. The platform they run on has no native factors economic system. There is no option to reward members for peer solutions, guides, or contributions. Distributors that might fill that hole needed costs the group funds could not help.

So Rachael constructed one herself. From scratch. With out a growth background.

The system she constructed is a seven-step Zapier workflow that acts as a translation layer between Airtable and their group platform. When a member’s level stability reaches one in every of six tier thresholds, the workflow fires: JavaScript transforms the info, three webhook calls deal with authentication, pull the Consumer ID, and apply the brand new rank contained in the platform. What the platform could not do natively, Rachael in-built a day utilizing Zapier Copilot to work by way of the API calls she’d by no means written earlier than.

Our present group platform does not provide a factors economic system. So I constructed one. The entire thing runs on Zapier and now we’ve a platform functionality that did not exist a 12 months in the past, on high of a device that was by no means designed to help it.

This system is now dwell throughout the total group. Peer solutions in E-Studying Heroes offset important help prices for Articulate. The gamification layer exists to reward the conduct that makes that potential. Earlier than this construct, there was no option to do it. Now there’s.

When Jeff joined Redis, Zapier wasn’t damaged. It simply wasn’t constructed. A number of groups needed to make use of it. Nobody owned it. No success standards. No governance. Each new use case was a one-off.

Jeff’s first intuition wasn’t to construct a workflow. It was to construct a basis.

He began with entry: SSO, SCIM, and consumer provisioning throughout 5 groups. Then governance: shared folders, service accounts, restricted actions on essentially the most delicate apps. Then consumption: a prioritization course of so groups may carry use circumstances ahead with out IT changing into a bottleneck. He went from zero Zapier expertise to a completely ruled enterprise implementation in a matter of weeks. He used the MCP and SDK to wire Zapier into the broader AI tooling Redis was constructing round it.

Jeff is fast to level out that it was a crew effort. Akissi Lewis, his venture supervisor, stored the rollout on observe, and Jason Illiscas dealt with the Okta integration that enabled the ruled entry.

I had by no means used Zapier earlier than. Just a few weeks later, Redis had SSO, SCIM, ruled entry, crucial app restrictions, and a path for groups to carry AI automation concepts ahead.

Natural demand is the metric he cares about. Groups are requesting entry and bringing use circumstances earlier than formal enablement has even began. That is not a rollout. That is adoption.

A observe on what we’re in search of

Fifty folks have submitted since we opened this system. The strongest entries had a couple of issues in frequent.

They had been particular. Rachael may inform us precisely what was damaged: a group of 140,000 with no option to reward members who answered one another’s questions. Jeff may title his drawback too, 5 groups that needed Zapier with nobody proudly owning it and nothing ruled. That form of element is what made the submissions credible.

The builders additionally weren’t who you’d count on. Rachael is a group strategist. Jeff had by no means used Zapier the week he began. Each pulled off one thing their job descriptions by no means requested for.

And the numbers held up: 140,000 group members being rewarded by a system in-built a day, 5 groups ruled from scratch in a matter of weeks. Should you’re sitting on a quantity like that, that is a submission.

Submissions are open all summer season. We’re naming month-to-month winners by way of June, July, and August, with the annual award winners being introduced on stage at ZapConnect 2026.

→ Submit your greatest AI construct as we speak

If you recognize a builder like Rachael or Jeff, present them some love and submit a nomination.