Zappy Award Winners Expose Automation's New Power Base

The first 2026 Zappy Award winners are not AI lab heads or software engineers, they’re the people closest to broken work: a community lead at Articulate and a systems architect at Redis.

Zapier launched the awards in May to recognize builders “quietly redesigning how work gets done” inside their companies, and the program has already hit 50 submissions, according to the Zapier Blog. That early response pushed Zapier to name its first monthly winners sooner than planned.

The connecting thread is clear. These aren’t showcase demos. They’re fixes for specific operational gaps: a missing points economy in a 140,000-member community, and a company-wide automation setup that had demand but no owner, rules, or intake path.

2026 Zappy Award winners spotlight automation built from inside the workflow

The Zappy Awards are aimed at employees who spot a work problem, pick up Zapier, and build around it. In May, the first two monthly winners came from very different corners of the business.

Rachael Silvano, Community Strategy Lead at Articulate, solved a member-recognition problem inside E-Learning Heroes. Jeff Hirsch, Systems Architect at Redis, built the governance layer needed for multiple teams to use Zapier without turning every request into a custom IT project.

That contrast matters. Silvano’s work shows automation as a product patch for a community platform. Hirsch’s work shows automation as internal infrastructure.

XOOMAR analysis: Zapier is turning these monthly awards into a public map of where workplace automation actually lands. The useful signal isn’t “AI transformation.” It’s the boring but valuable stuff: rank updates, provisioning, intake, restrictions, service accounts, and repeatable handoffs.

Rachael Silvano gave Articulate’s 140,000-member community a points economy

Rachael Silvano manages E-Learning Heroes, an Articulate community with 140,000 active members. The platform had a sharp limitation: it did not offer a native points economy, so Articulate had no built-in way to reward members for peer answers, guides, or other contributions.

Vendors could fill the gap, Zapier said, but their prices did not fit the community budget. Silvano built the missing layer herself, despite not having a development background.

“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 system is a seven-step Zapier workflow that acts as a translation layer between Airtable and the community platform. When a member’s point balance hits one of six tier thresholds, the workflow fires. JavaScript transforms the data, while three webhook calls handle authentication, pull the User ID, and apply the new rank inside the platform.

Zapier says Silvano built in an afternoon what the platform could not do natively, using Zapier Copilot to work through API calls she had never written before.

The practical value is not the badge itself. It’s that Articulate’s community depends on peer answers, and Zapier says those peer answers offset significant support costs. The gamification layer now rewards the behavior that makes that support model work.

XOOMAR analysis: This is the cleanest kind of internal automation story because the failure was easy to name. A large community needed incentives. The platform didn’t provide them. A vendor route didn’t fit the budget. So the person closest to the community built the missing feature at the workflow layer.

Jeff Hirsch turned Redis Zapier demand into governed access

Jeff Hirsch, Systems Architect at Redis, won for a very different problem. Zapier “wasn’t broken,” as the source puts it. It simply wasn’t built into the company’s operating model.

Multiple teams wanted to use it. No one owned it. There were no success criteria, no governance, and every new use case was becoming a one-off.

Hirsch started with the foundation rather than a single workflow. He set up SSO, SCIM, and user provisioning across five teams. Then he added governance through shared folders, service accounts, and restricted actions on the most sensitive apps.

The rollout also created an intake process so teams could bring use cases forward without turning IT into the chokepoint.

“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.”

Zapier says Hirsch went from zero Zapier experience to a fully governed enterprise implementation in a matter of weeks. He also used the MCP and SDK to wire Zapier into broader AI tooling Redis was building around it.

Hirsch credited Akissi Lewis, his project manager, for keeping the rollout on track, and Jason Illiscas for handling the Okta integration that enabled governed access.

The metric Hirsch cares about is organic demand. Teams are requesting access and bringing use cases before formal enablement has even started.

XOOMAR analysis: Silvano built a capability the platform lacked. Hirsch built the control plane that lets automation spread without turning into sprawl. One story is about unlocking a workflow. The other is about making sure many future workflows have rules before they scale.

Fifty early submissions reveal demand for no-code workplace automation

The 50 submissions matter because Zapier says the quality arrived faster than expected. That pushed the company to move up its first monthly wins.

Zapier also said the strongest entries had a few traits in common:

• Specificity: Silvano could name the exact gap, a 140,000-member community with no reward system for contributors.
• Ownership: Hirsch could name his issue, five teams wanted Zapier but no one owned governance.
• Unexpected builders: Silvano is a community strategist. Hirsch had never used Zapier when he started.
• Measurable scope: The examples included 140,000 community members and five governed teams.

That is a useful filter for anyone watching the automation market from the inside. The strongest workplace automation stories don’t start with tool lists. They start with broken operating details.

XOOMAR applies the same test across technology and finance coverage: follow the proof, not the pitch. That’s why stories like Bank Subscriptions Turn Fee Pain Into Monthly Gamble and First Human Dose Throws ER-100 Age-Reversal Bet Into Peril matter for the same editorial reason. Specific claims need specific evidence.

For the 2026 Zappy Award winners, the evidence is operational. A workflow fires when a points threshold is reached. A user is provisioned through governed access. A sensitive app has restricted actions. These are small systems, but they’re concrete.

Monthly winners could make hidden automation work visible

Monthly recognition changes the incentive structure. A useful internal automation often stays buried in one team because documenting it takes time and no one gets rewarded for the write-up.

The Zappy Awards give builders a reason to explain what they made, who it helped, and what changed. That benefits the employee, but it also benefits Zapier. Public customer stories show where the product is doing real work across roles, not just inside traditional IT or engineering teams.

There’s a risk in celebrating every automation win too loosely. As more non-technical teams build workflows, governance, security, data accuracy, and maintenance become part of the story. Hirsch’s Redis implementation stands out because it treated those issues as the starting point, not the cleanup phase.

Silvano’s case shows the other side. Sometimes the right builder is not the person with formal technical ownership. It’s the person who understands the work well enough to know exactly where the system fails.

The bigger picture: workplace automation is becoming a grassroots skill

The first 2026 Zappy Award winners suggest Zapier wants to spotlight a specific kind of workplace builder: someone close enough to the problem to define it sharply, and technical enough, with no-code tools and AI assistance, to ship a working fix.

That’s the useful trend. The awards are less about flashy AI claims and more about practical workflow redesign. A rank update. A provisioning rule. A governed intake path. A missing platform capability rebuilt through APIs and webhooks.

Submissions remain open through the summer, with monthly winners planned through June, July, and August, and annual winners set to be announced on stage at ZapConnect 2026.

The next signal to watch is whether future winners look more like Silvano or Hirsch. If they look like both, Zapier’s strongest story won’t be that automation belongs to every team. It will be that every team now needs builders who understand the work, the data, and the rules well enough to change how execution happens.

Key Takeaways

• Zapier’s first monthly winners highlight employees solving practical workflow gaps from inside their organizations.
• The awards show automation being used for both customer community engagement and internal enterprise governance.
• Early interest, with 50 submissions, suggests strong demand for recognizing non-engineering automation builders.