Vercel trained an AI agent on its best salesperson. Then it cut the 10-person team down to 1.

"As companies race to deploy AI, Vercel says it has found a way to get ahead: They are training AI agents on how their best employees work. The $9.3 billion company, founded by coder Guillermo Rauch in 2015, is a cloud-based platform for developers to build and deploy websites and applications. It's now using AI agents to automate the rote work of many of its entry-level roles, allowing it to reduce a once 10-person team down to just one person and a bot."

"Agents are commonly defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. They break down problems, outline plans, and take action without being prompted by a user. "If you can document a workflow, it's now pretty straightforward to have an agent do it," Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Vercel's chief operating officer, told Business Insider. The process of developing an AI agent began in June, when the company launched an internal initiative within its sales department."

Vercel is training AI agents on the workflows of its top-performing employees to automate routine tasks and shift staff to higher-value roles. The company hired David Totten from Databricks to lead the initiative and launched the effort within its sales department in June. Engineers shadowed a standout sales development representative for six weeks and documented every step to build a 'lead agent' that mimics the process. The agent reviews inbound messages, filters spam, qualifies leads by querying internal databases and using OpenAI's Deep Research, drafts personalized responses, and routes support inquiries, reducing a 10-person team to one person and a bot.

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