Argentina Week 2026 | Argentine Talent Powering Global AI | Guillermo Rauch & Hernán Kazah

Well, thanks for having me. Thanks for the amazing intro. I grew up in Lanús, which is in the outskirts of Buenos Aires for those that are not familiar with Argentina. We call it the Conurbano. And my entire childhood I obsessed over creating software. I found, and obviously I didn't know this as a kid, but my limiting factor to my prominence in the world was the quality of my tools. When I sat down to learn programming, to teach myself programming, I was limited by my tools. The tools at the time weren't open. So we had to, you know, figure out how to get compilers and software and CD-ROMs and whatever. The internet was just getting started. But what I realized is by betting on open source and creating amazing tools for developers, I made my own success. And then with Vercel, I wanted to democratize that creativity and creation power to everyone in the world. So I moved basically from Buenos Aires to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, where I started Vercel. Vercel is an infrastructure automation company. So we sit behind the scenes of a lot of the great applications and great builders of our times. We run OpenAI. We run little startups like anyone that has a dream and wants to make it a reality, like the next developer that's in Lanús. And increasingly what we're seeing is that we're going beyond developers. Everyone within your enterprises or your kids at home or your friends now have the ability to use AI to generate software. So we're at a special time in, I think, the history of technology, the history of humanity, where power that belonged to only a few people is now being democratized to the many.

We always had this perspective. So when I grew up in Argentina, one of the things that I obsessed with was the customer experience side of engineering. I remember my dad, he was like, you need to learn C++, you need to learn Java. He would come up with ideas because he didn't know how to program himself. But what I obsessed with was the interface layer between the human and the computer. And I built this thesis sort of intuitively that if I could create technology that improves the customer experience, then that would improve your business. So when we started Vercel, we came to market saying, for example, one of our great clients is Under Armour or McDonald's. When you order your next Big Mac or a Big Arch on the web, you're going to be using Vercel. So we realized if we help companies like these create an amazing experience for their customers, then their businesses will improve. And so we've kind of transcended a lot of these eras of technology because when we started out it was all about cloud. Now it's all about agents, but agents need to be deployed in the service of improving our lives and improving customers' lives. And so now we're helping customers like DoorDash, like McDonald's navigate this new transformation chapter for them. And we do that again by simplifying their tools, by automating their infrastructure, and by empowering their developers to create.

Yeah. You know, something that's fairly unusual about me is that I went to Carlos Pellegrini School in Buenos Aires. I dropped high school and then I briefly moved to Switzerland and then Silicon Valley. I'm self-made in the sense of my resume became the things that I was creating. I was open sourcing code. I was shipping software. And so I didn't need a resume like I went to university so and so. I had an MBA program in so and so. And so I think that trend will continue to accelerate. The way that I hire today is by examining, working backwards from, you know, what are you shipping? What's your resume of the things that you've put into the hands of customers? I care less about your technical ability because AI is increasingly generating more of the code. I care actually more now than ever before about business acumen. Like we used to hire engineers in Silicon Valley that almost had this incredibly mathematical brain because we needed to sit them down in front of a terminal and just crank out code. Now we're focusing on people that can crank out entire products and think about the customer, revenue, cost, marketing. And so I have this funny anecdote because I spotted this gentleman on the X platform which is sort of the new public square. We have Milei, we have Elon, I'm there all the time. And I spotted this guy who seemed very promising. He was shipping stuff and he was posting about it and I reached out to him. It turns out he's a 21-year-old from Rosario, Argentina. I've never been to Rosario, distant province. And he became one of my top engineers almost overnight to the point that now as we continue our collaborations with AI labs, the other day I had the privilege of demoing to Elon Musk and so it was a Sunday, he works at the office, he's at the office seven days a week and I had to move really quick. I had this opportunity, Elon said come over now and so who's online? Stean from Rosario. He's like, Stean, we have to cook, let's start cracking out code. We have to show this demo to the big guy. And so this is kind of the fluidity of the world that we live in today. You know, I care less about college degree and I care more about your integrity, your grindset, and ultimately your ability to ship.

And so, you know, our position, our official position at Vercel is I will help your enterprise not lock yourself in to one particular model vendor. I help you create an abstraction between your applications and your agents and the model providers. I think that's really healthy for the future of capitalism because it encourages competition. But I think for the future of humanity, we have to worry about is this AI operating in a truth-seeking way? Is it operating upholding the values of liberty and Western civilization? Does it embed biases into its neural network? And so a lot of the conversation with Elon is about that. A lot of the conversation is also about coding because coding is both the skill that was really sought after in Silicon Valley, but increasingly coding models are becoming the foundation of what I think will become AGI. Coding models like Claude Code are not just writing code. They're beginning to automate every aspect of every operation at your company. And I think this is a level of autonomy that these agents are getting that is somewhat unprecedented. I think most people outside of Silicon Valley cannot yet grasp what this little tool that when you look at it, it looks so innocent. Like you've seen Claude Code, right? It looks like a black terminal from the 1960s, but that thing contains a level of autonomy that can be quite scary if we don't, you know, wrap our heads around it.

Yeah, I have a simple principle which is that all software will become generative and will be generated. We're used to the idea that you go and you pay an engineer and they sit down and they crank out code. In the future, all software will be spontaneously generated. I was talking to the CEO of MercadoLibre. They have 20,000 engineers. Block just laid off 4,000 engineers. There are a lot of engineers that are operating in manual mode. They're operating, and again things are changing so fast that I have empathy because three years ago, oh wow, that was the job to have. Like you're cranking out code. Three years later, no, your job is to empower the machine that will generate the code. So it's a little bit like you become the factory owner rather than the employee that was in the line of production. And so I don't think most companies have actualized to this insight and the other part is that software will become generative. So you look at all these SaaS stocks, right, and what happens is those companies sat down in a room typically in Palo Alto and said, you know, I'm going to create an interface for operating your investment bank and it's going to have this menu on the left and when you log in it's going to have this chart that says assets under management. Guess what? The user of tomorrow doesn't want to see that. They want to see something else because the world is changing really fast. And so the pressure that will come upon the companies that created this rigid software will be that consumers will start going to agents instead and those agents will be giving them more fluid responses. They'll get data and transform it into high-fidelity representations in real time. I think a lot of software will disappear because you'll be just talking to your assistant, right? Your assistant will tell you the answer. There will be some software running behind the scenes to get you the answer of course. But you have to think that increasingly as a digital employee or a digital being that is sort of operating hopefully aligned with your incentives.

Yeah, I'm not a radical, you know, all UI will disappear guy. Why? Fundamentally we're very visual beings, right? We have a lot of customers in fashion and retail and they use Vercel because they want their customers to come in and see the beautiful fashion that they've designed and the products that they've created. But I believe that in order to survive, interfaces will have to become more agentic, which is another step in this transformation from static to dynamic to generative. When I go to Amazon, right, they're seeing that when you use their shopping assistant, their agent, Rufus, they increase conversion, they increase customer retention, they help customers find the product that they actually wanted. Now, when I use your products or when I use your websites, most of the time I'm actually looking at static content. And so I think what will determine winners and losers is how quickly are you going to identify your user interfaces?