We launched the Zappy Awards in May to find the builders quietly redesigning how work gets done at their companies. We're on the hunt for the people who see a problem, pick up Zapier, and do something about it.
We've hit 50 submissions. We weren't expecting the bar to be this high this fast. So we've decided to move up our first monthly wins to start right now!
These are the first two monthly winners.
Rachael Silvano, Community Strategy Lead at Articulate
Rachael manages E-Learning Heroes, a community with 140,000 active members. The platform they run on has no native points economy. There's no way to reward members for peer answers, guides, or contributions. Vendors that could fill that gap wanted prices the community budget couldn't support.
So Rachael built one herself. From scratch. Without a development background.
The system she built is a seven-step Zapier workflow that acts as a translation layer between Airtable and their community platform. When a member's point balance reaches one of six tier thresholds, the workflow fires: JavaScript transforms the data, three webhook calls handle authentication, pull the User ID, and apply the new rank inside the platform. What the platform couldn't do natively, Rachael built in an afternoon using Zapier Copilot to work through the API calls she'd never written before.
Our current community platform doesn't offer a points economy. So I built one. The whole thing runs on Zapier and now we have a platform capability that didn't exist a year ago, on top of a tool that was never designed to support it.
The program is now live across the full community. Peer answers in E-Learning Heroes offset significant support costs for Articulate. The gamification layer exists to reward the behavior that makes that possible. Before this build, there was no way to do it. Now there is.
Jeff Hirsch, Systems Architect at Redis
When Jeff joined Redis, Zapier wasn't broken. It just wasn't built. Multiple teams wanted to use it. No one owned it. No success criteria. No governance. Every new use case was a one-off.
Jeff's first instinct wasn't to build a workflow. It was to build a foundation.
He started with access: SSO, SCIM, and user provisioning across five teams. Then governance: shared folders, service accounts, restricted actions on the most sensitive apps. Then intake: a prioritization process so teams could bring use cases forward without IT becoming a bottleneck. He went from zero Zapier experience to a fully governed enterprise implementation in a matter of weeks. He used the MCP and SDK to wire Zapier into the broader AI tooling Redis was building around it.
Jeff is quick to point out that it was a team effort. Akissi Lewis, his project manager, kept the rollout on track, and Jason Illiscas handled the Okta integration that enabled the governed access.
I had never used Zapier before. A few weeks later, Redis had SSO, SCIM, governed access, critical app restrictions, and a path for teams to bring AI automation ideas forward.
Organic demand is the metric he cares about. Teams are requesting access and bringing use cases before formal enablement has even started. That's not a rollout. That's adoption.
A note on what we're looking for
Fifty people have submitted since we opened the program. The strongest entries had a few things in common.
They were specific. Rachael could tell us exactly what was broken: a community of 140,000 with no way to reward members who answered each other's questions. Jeff could name his problem too, five teams that wanted Zapier with no one owning it and nothing governed. That kind of detail is what made the submissions credible.
The builders also weren't who you'd expect. Rachael is a community strategist. Jeff had never used Zapier the week he started. Both pulled off something their job descriptions never asked for.
And the numbers held up: 140,000 community members being rewarded by a system built in an afternoon, five teams governed from scratch in a matter of weeks. If you're sitting on a number like that, that's a submission.
Submissions are open all summer. We're naming monthly winners through June, July, and August, with the annual award winners being announced on stage at ZapConnect 2026.
→ Submit your best AI build today
If you know a builder like Rachael or Jeff, show them some love and submit a nomination.
