Agents are starting to buy services directly

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 18:17

   Because you've now had to, you know, open the kimono to multiple different kinds of new products to keep it. Totally. So in the beginning of time, there was the web and it was made out of pages and human-centric interfaces. meaning you open up a website, you open up an application, and you are the one consuming. It's machine to human. The era that we're going into now is more agent to agent. Imagine a place where you can deploy interfaces for agents.

2. 18:56

   So a simple example is when an agent goes to forsell.com, I don't give them the fancy people should go to Vercel.com they're going to see this beautiful triangle with a gradient our engineers, our agents carefully chiseled this beautiful animation I don't give them that the agent don't care the agent wants straight signal so what we give the agent and this is a Vercel cloud capability we give them highly precise information about our business that the agent needs to learn So you're creating your website now for agents.

3. 19:32

   Correct. And we're helping everybody in the world make this transformation as fast as they can. Because if they don't make that transformation, they're going to be left out of the most exciting economic opportunity of our times. Because more and more of the traffic of the internet will be agents doing stuff for us. So I'll give you a very simple example. If you ask Muse to build you a website, it will use Vercel.

4. 19:59

   So you can go off and say, oh, I'm going to go, I'm going to visit Vercel, I'm going to get some information about how to build software, and then I'm going to build something for this user. And so I need to present my best face to that agent and to the many, many, many other agents that are going to. And this is true for every business, right? Like you could have, I mean, the example is super top of mind for people is like DoorDash, customer for sale, just shipped a agent where you can ask for a burrito over text message.

5. 20:29

   You know, it's kind of like you could argue it's a gimmick. You know, actually, some people will use it, whatever. The key point is that that is an agentic interface. There's going to be people talking to an agent and then that agent will go and talk to DoorDash. Funny enough, a lot of the internet was built to block bots, which is kind of nuts. A lot of websites are saying, oh, you know what? They're basically technology that was built for a different era that actually says, no, no, no, this is a bot.

6. 21:01

   I don't want this traffic. Vercel is actually taking the opposite posture. We're saying, no, no, no, the moment is now to help every business in the world retool themselves for agents, for agents and by agents. That's a really good point. I just put out this interview that I did with John Collison of Stripe at the browser base. We were also talking about this before, but at the browser base Navigate conference.

7. 21:26

   And so they're the browser for agents to browse the internet or the connector for agents to browse the internet. But I was talking to John Collison about this and John said, why do we need bot detection? Do we need bot detection anymore? Everything's a bot. What are we detecting? What you do need that we provide is bot intelligence. It's so important to know if the bot is having good experience, which is kind of nuts to think about, right?

8. 21:50

   And the transformation that our Vercel made is to go from developer experience, which is sort of our first customer was a developer, to now the agentic developer experience. And so it's very important that you do understand, okay, am I getting ChatGPT on my website? Because I want ChatGPT. I want them to get the best possible information. I want them to get contextual information. And people are not just distributing static information on the internet.

9. 22:16

   They're also distributing capabilities. And so you also want to expose your tools, your products, your services to the agents. We partner with Stripe and Shopify to offer agents the ability to transact, which is another astonishing fact about the for sale business is that we see agents now purchasing our services. We see one of the most popular tools in the Vercel toolset is a capability that helps agents buy stuff from our marketplace.

10. 22:49

    So, for example, if an agent needs to buy a web browser, they can purchase browser-based through the Vercel marketplace. And I'm enabling that transaction end-to-end without any human intervention. It's like the agent is visiting the virtual Vercel shelf and is saying, oh, I need that. and then I say, okay, it's this much. And so what's really, really important for business owners is, okay, you need to have this intelligence about what's happening with all of these agents.

11. 23:18

    Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, the coding agents, and even the search engine crawlers. Because one important thing that people need to know is models are getting trained all the time, but they have certain cutoffs in training. When ChatGPT first came out and you would ask it, hey, ChatGPT, what day is it? it would say, oh, it's three years ago or something like that, right? And so what we have done as an industry is we give, one of the fundamental tools that we give the agent is the ability to search the internet.

12. 23:49

    And so it's still very important for businesses to be really good at putting out their content. In fact, I'll give you an example. So when you put out your podcasts and your shows, what you want to make sure is that there is a transcript as well so that when an agent, I'm not even going to say I because I'm not going to be doing it, right? When I say my agent, hey, what did Molly say about so-and-so?

13. 24:12

    If you basically fed the internet with that information, you're going to be there more readily available to the agent. And this is true for basically every business online.