Well, hello everyone. I'm Jean Grosser, the COO of Vercel, and this is Guillermo Rauch, our founder and CEO. G, between the two of us, I am pretty sure that we have been on every single developer podcast out there.
Every podcast and I think multiple times.
Yes. And so I am thrilled to announce to you all today the inaugural Vercel podcast live from Dreamforce.
So look, everybody in this room has some sort of AI mandate and you probably don't yet have a clear picture for exactly what that entails. And I think both G and I spent a lot of time talking to leaders out there and we find that that is pretty common.
We recently raised a series F and when we did that you shipped a blog post out towards the AI cloud.
Exactly. Sort of where we saw the future headed and I think what struck me in that is the fact that not even the giants of technology have it figured out either.
Yeah. AI is like the great equalizer. We're all being disrupted. We're all on common ground.
So, as you just said, we're talking about something fundamentally disrupting enterprises, how they build software, how you put together teams, how you think about road maps. And we all get to do it together. I joined Vercel because I believed that in the fullness of time, every pixel on the internet could be built on Vercel. And then I rapidly came to also realize that hopefully every token will also be processed on our platform and I think AI is accelerating that vision even further. So absolutely I'm excited to dive in with you.
So to kick us off, Vercel is celebrating its 10th anniversary in short order and you founded the company based on a lifelong belief about the dynamic web and we're now seeing that turn into the agentic web. So tell me a little bit about what that means for the enterprise.
Yeah, speaking of disruption, if you think about the web as it's existed so far, you've thought about domain names, going to websites, getting snappy responses. Hopefully, when you go to those websites, you find exactly what you want at the right time. And so, we've been huge advocates of a dynamic web because we all want to go to these applications and get exactly what we want out of them. So we call the first chapter of Vercel the front-end cloud. It's all about creating the best possible customer experiences. But I think rapidly, you know, the platforms are shifting. You used to ship applications that were very much pixel-centric. Now you're shipping agents that you might not even see that you might interact through conversation like we just showed yesterday with Slack. Or with voice. And so this means there's a new category of software and there's an opportunity to create the best platform for this agentic software.
And you and I talk a lot about the shift from pixels to tokens. In June, Vercel launched the AI cloud. What is your view on how things are going to shift with the internet and in particular the infrastructure you're going to need to power that?
Yeah, the cloud was born with Amazon Web Services. Web was in the name of the origination of the cloud. If I was to rethink the cloud today, I would be thinking about agents as the primary piece of software that you deploy. And what this means fundamentally is that from the developer experience, you have to rethink what it's like to build and to put in that first brick. You have to rethink about the infrastructure. There's probably new kinds of services, many of which we're already creating, but many yet to be discovered that are all coming and emerging from this idea of building agents. And so AI cloud is what we call this emerging category of what is a perfect platform on top of which you can do this AI transformation.
And what are some of those components like? You know, we talk about you need different frameworks within AI, you need different compute runtime. What are some of the big things you think will change?
Yeah, as an example, the very first thing that you wanted to do with the cloud for a lot of us was shipping a great e-commerce experience. So, Amazon.com was sort of like the poster child of cloud infrastructure, right? And so I would go to this website and what I want is a 100 millisecond response times and a personalized set of products and experiences just for me. I want the website to remember who I am, etc. I feel like the cloud was under a certain time pressure. You go to a site and need to respond really fast. With agents, it almost seems like it's the opposite. It's like being flipped upside down. Instead of the agent responding right away, I might just want the agent to go and build me something for 3 hours and then come back to me with the exact answer and the exact insight. I believe that the AI cloud will be a lot more event driven.
Maybe the agent starts working off of a lead that just emerged from my website and it goes off and does a bunch of compute in the background. And so if you give this problem to developers, it starts to become obvious that they need new tools.
They need new best practices, they need new cloud primitives.
And so within that, I think one of the hotter topics right now is what becomes of the software engineer two to three years from now? Are we all just managers of agents? Is everyone a developer?
Yeah, as someone that grew up with barely having access to a modern text editor, I've seen all of the evolutions of software engineering. I believe that the closest thing that we've had to AI was something that Vercel has been known for, which is frameworks. We created the world's most popular React framework, Next.js. It sort of gives guardrails to enterprises to be extremely productive. In fact, I'll say the number one difference between traditional clouds and Vercel is that we took a very holistic approach to solving everything. We give you the framework, we give you the dev tools, we give you the services, we give you the CDN, we make everything really fast. It's like the cloud on autopilot. And so, chapter one for us was putting infrastructure on autopilot, the self-driving car of the cloud. Chapter two for us is the self-driving car of software itself. Code is now being generated rather than written by human beings. I believe expertise from software engineers will continue to be highly relevant. What I think is changing is that the very competent developers are now becoming basically agent orchestrators. I walk around the office and I see some of our young AI engineers and they're managing five or six agents at a time. It's a little bit like you're becoming an engineering manager even if you are an individual contributor. But what's even more cool to see is that now if I'm walking from the engineering room to HR, I'm also seeing them generate products with AI. I think what's really amazing about AI for software is that it's the ultimate democratizer. Frameworks democratized us and got us here. But I believe that AI code generation will have an even more profound effect. I think numerically you can think of going from like 20 million software developers to hundreds of millions of software developers.
And so that obviously will be a tectonic shift. I think the other thing there's a lot of debate around is if all these agents are just doing stuff on our behalf in the background, is there even a UI anymore? Do pixels matter?
Yeah, I believe so. So at the end of every agent is some outcome that is highly valued to that user. So we have customers like Gamma who are automating the production of slides, right? And so you're going to do a bunch of agentic work but at the end of it there's a presentation. We have customers that are automating spreadsheets. So you do a bunch of work and at the end of it there's some result and the best way to present this result turns out to be a spreadsheet style UI for V0. You know, again, the agent is creating software for you, but you're actually in the driver's seat kind of saying if you like the design or not. You want a high-fidelity user interface for the task at hand. And the other thing that's happening, and you see this with ChatGPT, especially the recent news around ChatGPT being able to embed your UIs and your products within their experience, it's obvious that text is not enough.
Yeah. If I ask an agent, what's the weather today? Well, I might want the best possible representation for weather and its forecast in a beautiful cloudy, foggy San Francisco icon. And so, I believe UI will continue to be really, really important. My sort of high-level framework is your own.com. You have to continue to invest. You want to make it agentic and AI powered itself, but you also don't want to not play ball with all of these other agents. And so you want to also show up where the conversation is happening.
Yeah. Actually a really good analogy somebody gave me recently was in marketing when social started being popular. So people were like, either do I not need that at all or is it going to overtake all of the traditional marketing needs? Same fear response. And so it's the same sort of thing of like of course you're.com, you want people to come to a place where you own the brand, you own that experience but you also now have this new channel in having your UI in ChatGPT and so of course you want to be anywhere relevant. And I believe that also from a game theory perspective I think none of us want to get disintermediated. And to the extent that you can continue to invest in that customer loyalty, you have the domain expertise, you have the brand, you understand your customer the best. And so if you can, and this is the promise of the AI cloud, build AI capabilities into your products and into your front ends in addition to integrating with the agents that are becoming overwhelmingly popular.
Yeah. So you talked a little bit about V0. We demoed V0 and Slack two days ago at that keynote. And so it's really the view is there, you're letting everyone create at the speed of ideas. So do you think this, what is this going to enable for different customers out there that now maybe non-developers actually can contribute to software development and your website?
Yeah. Anytime I've shown V0 to people, if I show V0 to someone that's never seen it before, they have such a shocking response. It's like, well, is this the end of all software? Because I show them how you can prompt and generate the application of your dreams. But one of the first responses I started getting especially from non-full-time developers, solutions engineers started thinking about well when I'm in the process of selling a product what can I show the prospect? I can show them slides, I can talk, I can yap, or I can show them that I'm already doing the work. I can show them an artifact that is demonstrating the capabilities of my technology. So this is what we did when we helped Overstock migrate to Vercel. Our solutions engineering team took the existing Overstock which was hosted in a legacy platform. I'm not going to name names, legacy platform and they took a screenshot and put it into V0 and V0 started porting the platform into cutting edge Next.js and Vercel code within one phone call. Right within that Zoom call you could start to generate this migration.
Yeah. And so V0 as a catalyst not only for new ideas but for transformation has been an incredible use case that led to a conversation with the CEO and president, or sorry, president of Overstock and Bed Bath and Beyond, Marcus Lemonis, who's somewhere here in the conference and he started thinking about even generating software himself.
Yep. So he showed me how he was using at the time, I believe models change every day. I believe ChatGPT had just come out with image generation and he asked me, well I can use ChatGPT to generate an image, could I use V0 to generate software? And we started going back and forth on creating a landing page for Camping World, another one of his businesses. This man is super prolific. And so V0 is starting to change how we communicate and it's changing the conversation from just being words to being prototypes of software and even finished production-grade applications.
You have to, along those lines, you've got to tell the story of with Camping World and LA Fires. Because there you have a situation, LA fires are happening, rapid response. It's so hard for that type of company that doesn't have tons of software developers like you have to be able to respond and spin up a new site.
And it's fascinating because now you have here someone in leadership that wants to make a difference for the world. He wanted to voice out Camping World can help with this disaster relief efforts. And again, we're able to generate from English prompts. We were able to use his brand language. We're able to use his iconography. We're able to use his colors. In fact, something that was fascinating is the model already knew about Camping World. So, all we had to prompt in V0 was make it look like Camping World. And so, it was just an amazing experience.
