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- He was on Law & Order & now runs AI transformation at Zapier.
He was on Law & Order & now runs AI transformation at Zapier.
Introducing Phil Lakin, the operator companies call when AI adoption stalls, plus his take on why most project rollouts quietly die.
Noah Cheyer
August 18, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Most people building AI careers came out of engineering. Philip Lakin came out of off-Broadway, with credits on Law & Order and at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Then he co-founded NoCodeOps, the community for enterprise automation professionals, raised $4.5M from Slow Ventures, Caffeinated Capital and Base10, and sold it to Zapier in 2024. He is now Zapier's Director of AI Transformation. He built Lead Router, Zapier's first solution product, and he runs a 12-month embedded program with enterprise partners.
I just signed Phil as an exclusive speaker. His page and his new speaker reel went live this morning:
Phil has spent more than 1,000 hours in the field with enterprise AI leaders, and his read is that most companies do not have an AI strategy problem. They have an adoption problem. Executives approve the tools, and six months later a handful of people use them and everyone else went back to the old way.
On LogRocket's LaunchPod he named why that happens:
It can't just be top down and it can't just be bottoms up. Bottoms up just turns into wild, wild west. Tops down turns into a bunch of governance and strategy and slide decks with no one actually ending up doing anything. You need the lightning and you need the bottle, and you need both of them to be meeting together.
The objection he hears from leadership is that opening AI to everyone will make a mess.
His answer:
"You should only be so lucky to have that problem."
Which is also why his sessions are hands-on. Leaders build a working AI agent themselves before they leave the room, because in his experience that is the only place the shift happens:
"When the people who know the problem the deepest get the aha moment with these tools, that's where the magic happens. And by the way, that aha moment's not gonna happen presenting your whole company a slide deck."
He holds that line even when it costs him work. At Zapier, he turns down AI transformation engagements from companies that want a centralized deployment with nobody hands-on. His floor is that everyone from intern to CEO touches the tools, so that at minimum they become "a human smoke detector for manual processes that shouldn't exist."
His starting move for anyone reading this costs nothing: skip the courses, take one task you do by hand every week, and rebuild it with AI. And when you build an agent, treat it the way you would treat a very smart new hire who knows nothing about your business. Give it context, show it what good looks like, and sit with it the first five times.
Here is what two people said after working with him:
"Phil doesn't just talk about AI and automation; he gets your team doing it. His sessions walk teams through super practical, directly relevant scenarios while clearly explaining the core principles behind them. It's the best kind of learning: hands-on, real, and immediately useful."
The day I spent in the Zapier Executive AI Workshop led by Phil was the best executive event I have ever attended. It was an eye opener for me of what's possible and I walked out with meaningful connections and ideas.
At Techstars, Katie Smith watched founders build their MVPs live during his workshop. Gartner books him on the human side of AI adoption, and Miro, MarketingOps.com, Revenue Operations Alliance and Citizen Development Week have put him in front of their audiences. He has run rooms in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, London and Paris.
The acting training shows up on stage. He is comfortable in front of a room and he builds energy instead of reading slides. One of his AI explainers has more than 5 million views.
His signature keynote is on when to use deterministic automation and when to use inference-driven AI, which is the call teams keep getting wrong on their next ten workflow requests. He also has a playbook talk on company-wide adoption, plus the NoCodeOps founder story for startup audiences.
If you have a sales kickoff or a leadership offsite where the goal is people leaving able to do something rather than having watched a demo, reply to this email and I will send you his details.
Till next time,
Noah
Do More With Less Using AI
PS: Know someone building a leadership offsite for Q4? Forward this along.
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