The numbers
Vercel CPO Tom Occhino shared production data from running hundreds of AI agents internally. The dev platform (1.5M developers, 10,000 enterprise customers, $9.3B valuation as of September 2025) is posting automation rates that matter:
- 93% of customer support runs with no human touch. What escalates is real signal: product gaps or config issues, not ticket volume.
- 96% of marketing content starts as AI-drafted posts from Slack threads. Humans edit and publish, but the first draft work disappeared.
- Lead qualification agent replaced the SDR team. Those people got redeployed into higher-impact roles. Occhino did not specify prior headcount or current comp structure.
Occhino's background matters here: 12 years at Facebook, co-created React. His CTO Malte Ubl spent 12 years at Google, built Core Web Vitals. These are not vendor pitches. This is infrastructure-level operating experience.
What this means for sales orgs
Vercel's thesis: every company needs at least two agents. One internal (handles employee workflows, kills legacy system navigation). One customer-facing (support, transactions, self-service).
The part that kills most agent vendor pitches: you cannot buy a one-size-fits-all agent, same as you cannot buy a generic website. Every team builds its own. What you buy is the infrastructure that makes building agents fast and safe.
For SDR and BDR teams, the question is not whether AI can do qualification. Vercel says it already does. The question is what those people do next. Occhino says redeployment into higher-impact roles. What that looks like in practice: worth asking in your next CRO sync.
The ANZ context
Vercel does not disclose ANZ-specific headcount or office presence in available public sources. The company's customer mix (self-serve developers plus enterprise accounts) usually means hybrid sales motion, not pure product-led growth.
If your sales org runs on manual lead qualification or first-touch support, the 93% and 96% numbers are the baseline to beat. Not because Vercel is special, but because the infrastructure is commodity now. Occhino's term: "undifferentiated heat loss." Every minute on work an agent can handle is energy not going to pipeline or product.
Worth noting: Vercel built these agents for internal use first, then productised the tooling. That order matters. If you are buying agent software from a vendor who has not run it themselves at scale, ask why.