From Sales Bots to Workforce Revolution: How Vercel is Redefining Efficiency with AI Agents Modeled on Its Best Employees
- AI Mimicry in Action: Vercel trains intelligent agents on the workflows of its top performers, automating routine tasks like lead qualification and spam filtering to streamline operations.
- Team Transformation Without Layoffs: By deploying these agents, the company reduced a 10-person sales team to just one human overseer, reallocating the rest to higher-value roles like outbound prospecting.
- Broader Vision for the Future: With plans to roll out hundreds of agents in the coming months, Vercel aims to free humans for creative, complex work, signaling a shift in how AI could reshape jobs across industries.
In the fast-paced world of tech, where artificial intelligence is no longer a buzzword but a business imperative, companies like Vercel are pioneering ways to integrate AI not just as a tool, but as a virtual extension of their top talent. Founded in 2015 by coder Guillermo Rauch, Vercel has grown into a $9.3 billion powerhouse, offering a cloud-based platform that empowers developers to build and deploy websites and applications with ease. Now, as the race to deploy AI heats up, Vercel is taking a bold step: training AI agents on the precise workflows of its best employees. This isn’t about replacing humans—it’s about amplifying them, shifting focus from mundane tasks to high-impact innovation. The result? A dramatic team reduction from 10 to 1 in one department, all while the company’s overall headcount continues to expand.
Building AI from Top Performers
The journey began in June, when Vercel’s chief operating officer, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser—who joined the company in March—launched an internal initiative within the sales department. Recognizing the potential of AI to handle repetitive work, Grosser assembled a team of three engineers to develop agents that could replicate and even enhance key sales processes. At the time, Vercel employed 10 sales development representatives (SDRs) dedicated to managing inbound queries—a typically entry-level role involving sifting through messages, qualifying leads, and routing inquiries. Among them was a standout performer whose efficiency and accuracy caught the team’s eye. For six weeks, the engineers shadowed this top SDR, meticulously documenting every step of their daily workflow.
From this observation, Vercel built its “lead agent,” a sophisticated AI system that now automates much of what those 10 SDRs once handled manually. Powered by tools like OpenAI’s Deep Research, the agent scans inbound messages, weeds out spam, and qualifies leads by cross-referencing internal databases and researching company details. It then crafts personalized responses and automatically directs support questions to the right channels. But it’s not entirely hands-off—a human manager reviews the agent’s outputs in Slack, offering feedback that refines the system over time, ensuring it captures Vercel’s unique tone and improves its performance. As Grosser explained to Business Insider, “If you can document a workflow, it’s now pretty straightforward to have an agent do it.” This agent embodies the essence of AI agents: virtual assistants that autonomously break down problems, devise plans, and execute actions without constant user input.
Reshaping Teams for Higher Impact
The impact was swift and transformative. Since deploying the lead agent, Vercel downsized its inbound sales team from 10 to just one person, who now primarily oversees the bot’s operations. The other nine team members weren’t let go; instead, they were reassigned to outbound prospecting roles, which Grosser describes as “higher-value, more complex sales work.” This move aligns with Vercel’s broader philosophy of elevating human roles rather than eliminating them. David Totten, a veteran from Databricks and Microsoft who joined Vercel as vice president of global field engineering just this Monday, puts it succinctly: “Modeling after the top-performing employees has always been a standard business practice. The difference now is that technology lets us accelerate it.” Totten’s hiring underscores Vercel’s commitment to this AI-driven strategy, bringing expertise from data-heavy environments to lead these efforts.
Grosser draws a compelling analogy to traditional employee training, likening AI development to mentoring interns. “You wouldn’t put an intern with somebody who was not showing up to work every day, didn’t have the right attitude, didn’t understand the vision of the company,” she said. “You put an intern with your best performers.” By cloning the habits of star employees, Vercel ensures its agents embody excellence from the start. Importantly, both Grosser and Totten emphasize that this isn’t a cost-cutting ploy aimed at downsizing the workforce. In fact, Vercel’s headcount has grown over the past year, reflecting a strategy focused on growth and efficiency rather than reduction.
A Future of AI-Amplified Human Potential
Vercel’s ambitions are expansive. The company currently has six AI agents in operation, each modeled after top performers in various departments. But the goal is to scale dramatically, deploying hundreds more within the next 6 to 12 months. Grosser highlights key traits that make a workflow ideal for agent automation: it must be replicable and deterministic, meaning it consistently yields the same results from the same inputs. This leaves the more nuanced, creative, and ambiguous tasks squarely in human hands—work that demands intellectual depth and innovation.
Vercel’s approach challenges the narrative that AI will displace jobs en masse. Instead, it paints a picture of symbiosis, where technology handles the rote and repetitive, freeing people to tackle challenges that truly leverage human ingenuity. As Grosser reflects, “My personal view is humans are capable of a lot more than most jobs allow them to do.” In a broader perspective, this model could inspire industries beyond tech, from finance to healthcare, to rethink how AI integrates with human talent. By training bots on the best of us, companies like Vercel aren’t just optimizing operations—they’re unlocking potential, ensuring that as AI evolves, so too does the role of the human worker in an increasingly automated world.