Vercel cut a 10-person sales team to one person using an AI agent

Vercel, the web company, used to have 10 people sorting incoming sales leads. Six weeks after it turned on an AI agent, it had one. Chief operating officer Jeanne DeWitt Grosser shared the numbers at the SaaStr AI conference, and SaaStr reported them. The agent costs under $5,000 a year to run, covering computing and usage fees.

How it worked

The job is called a sales development rep, or SDR. These are the people who check whether a new lead is worth a salesperson's time. Vercel ran its AI version in shadow mode for six weeks, meaning a human reviewed every output. Its best SDR did that review until she could not improve it further. DeWitt Grosser says it now performs like a 90th-percentile rep on every lead.

The build was small. One engineer prototyped it over a weekend. It launched with about 20% of one engineer's time behind it. One person now runs it for the US, and about 20% of another person covers Europe and Asia-Pacific. DeWitt Grosser said the displaced staff moved into more valuable roles.

The catch is your best person

The agent copies how an expert works. Vercel's took a few days of shadowing and six weeks of daily review from its top SDR. Using an average rep would likely produce an average agent. Vercel ran the same process on 30 SDR workflows, and sales quotas rose 30% that quarter.

Build or buy

Vercel also runs a customer support agent called Vertex at vercel.com/help. The company first tried an off-the-shelf product, was not happy with the results, and built its own. The story title says AI now handles 93% of its support cases. DeWitt Grosser checks every quarter whether a vendor now offers something better, faster or cheaper. If so, Vercel switches.

Tools without an API get dropped

An API is a way for software to talk to other software. Vercel's agents use them instead of clicking through screens. Its sales-call agent works inside Slack and pulls from Gong, a call-recording tool, and Salesforce. Both offer ways to connect. DeWitt Grosser said Vercel would have replaced either one if it had not.

• Vercel's data agent, d0, answers plain-English questions in Slack in under a minute.
• Those questions used to take about a week through a data team ticket.
• One in three deployments from Vercel customers now comes from an AI coding tool such as Claude Code or Codex.

What to keep in mind

These figures come from one company's own account of its work, relayed by a conference write-up. Vercel is a tech firm with in-house engineers, so a smaller business may not see the same results. Still, the comparison is now simple to state: several salaries for routine work versus a small tool that a part-time engineer maintains. For owners paying for repetitive tasks, a small test may be worth running.