Thoughts on Zapier trying to become OpenAI faster than OpenAPI can become Zapier? There will always be a long tail of APIs that folks want integrating, but the most popular APIs are perhaps only a few hundred in number (Google Calendar and Slack, for example).
I feel like history has shown that those who own the platform end up winning and in this case OpenAI's platform of models seems much harder to recreate. My guess is this would lead to Zapier using OpenAI as a platform and eventually OpenAI would re-create Zapier's integrations before the other way around.
I think this perspective is fair and historically accurate wrt platform risk, but I also strongly believe Zapier has substantial value beyond what historically has been acting as a conduit between APIs. Customers don't want a pipe between their services, they want to automate their mundane work with a robot.
What is Zapier's value-add when GPT can chain an arbitrary number of flexible API calls? Imagine if the GPT plug-ins directory is fed as input to GPT...
The problem with Zapier is all the individual accounts and contracts you need with dozens of companies in order to have them all communicating for a real business. SaaS fatigue is a real issue.
Sounds like a call for them to partner with Venminder or a similar business to manage all your SaaS from a contractual perspective, as well as some CASB (cloud access security broker) to handle onboarding, offboarding, and governance of an org's SaaS inventory. Legit problem, but SaaS isn't going away.
