Coding agents make personalized software viable

Transcript

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

1. 24:21

   That's why we have a newsletter. Subscribe to Sorcery.bc. No, that's a really good point. So to talk about that shift. So we had SEO, which was really important before. Then we went into the age of chat bots or that kind of thing. chat logs and we had GEO. I don't know what happened with that. But like, are you saying we need a new thing for agents? Like, what would that be? Yeah, it's not just giving them the information. That's sort of what AEO is about, which I think is, by the way, really, really important. It's also that you have to make sure that your product runs agentically, that the agents can use it. So for example, the fundamental protocol that or programming language, we can call it, when the internet first came around, it delivered hypertext. It delivered HTML, which some older people in the audience might recall as MySpace codes. So the internet for

2. 25:16

   humans was HTML. The internet of agents is new protocols. One is called MCP, which basically allows you to say, hey, agents, these are all the tools that you can use from my service. So, for example, the Vercel MCB says, here's how you deploy software. Here's how you list your projects. And so we're basically creating a presentation of Vercel that is very ergonomic to the agent. There's new protocols also emerging.

3. 25:43

   For example, one is the machine payment protocol or the universal commerce protocol. And so these are going to be the ones that you mentioned web browsers. when I ask my agent, hey, go and purchase the same thing that I purchase every month, or hey, go and get me this really cool, I take a photo of this, go get me this really cool microphone. It can go and browse a website. Or some companies will be out there saying, hey, agent, you can just buy far more quickly in more streamlined fashion because I'm speaking your language.

4. 26:16

   I'm speaking your protocol. And so I think what we're going to see over the next few years is a complete transformation of every product and every service towards it. And by the way, you see this even from the largest enterprises. I recently spoke at the Salesforce conference. Salesforce was built as a product that was awesome for humans. So you go and you see your list of contacts, your CRM. So it's that vision of a pixel-centric for humans interface.

5. 26:46

   But nowadays, the way that we work at Vercel is I can go into my agent that we deploy on Slack, and I can say, hey, tell me about Molly and how frequently she deploys on ForSale, because I'm going to have a meeting with her, and I'm her account executive. And give me a quick report on some of the problems that she's reported. So I never actually went to Salesforce. I just went to the agent, and the agent went to Salesforce. And so what we're helping companies figure out is, one, how do you build agents so that you can streamline your operations?

6. 27:20

   Almost everything we do at Vercel, we do with agents. So I don't have to learn this 20 different tools. And you may think, well, how big of a change is that? Well, what I can tell you is that agents are so much easier to use. It's such a disruption of how products are built. It's such a disruption of the Silicon Valley ethos even because you would go to any company in Palo Alto and they would be designing interfaces for humans.

7. 27:49

   They would be all gathered together in a room, and the wide one's like, okay, what does G have to see when he wants to prepare for a meeting? Well, let's put the profile picture of Molly up here and a five list of support tickets over here, and it was very fixed in time and space, and it was decided basically by a product design team somewhere in the world. The future of the internet is, well, at Vercel, we have our agent that helps prepare our Salesforce and our customer support teams.

8. 28:21

   The interfaces are more generative. So if I'm asking about an individual, it renders a profile of this individual. If I'm asking about a company, it gives me more contextual information about that company. So we're going more and more into a world that, you know, if you've watched Minority Report, it feels more like the information is just coming to you depending on everything, context, your level of experience. I may not want to give a beginner sales development representative the same kind of sophistication that I'm going to give my finance team. I want to give them an outlook of our business. And so these are all things that agents can solve for that websites and traditional pages and pixels could not solve for. And so we're basically helping this new generation of software be easy to build and ship to this to this companies so there's two questions

9. 29:18

   i want to ask off of that one is like what does the kind of like end state of the asian era look like i had shensi from merge on like a couple months ago and she's a huge fan she loves mark benioff she's a huge fan of salesforce and she saw it's just really funny to me but she saw them go headless and she was like he sees the future like he's seeing like beyond what what you know no one's really going to need to go into their sales force they can just interact with it uh and and use it headless and we're seeing this now as as you're saying with agents and and shopify and stripe it's like uh someone was uh talking about on x like you know they they're just buying directly the agent is buying directly from the brands and not going to amazon so like maybe that's helpful for small businesses.

10. 30:07

    Like what is this end state? Well, I'll tell you my sort of super opinionated point of view is I almost take the opposite stance. We're talking about your bending spoons thing that went viral. I don't believe in sort of aggregating piles and piles of software and in having what you could think of like lowest common denominator software. I believe in a future of personalized software. Vercel makes it such that you can prompt with your coding agent and generate software that's perfect for you.

11. 30:37

    You can build the podcast schedule, note-taking app and agent that fits just your needs. But most importantly for enterprises, their ROI on creating tools that are domain-specific is much, much, much greater. In fact, I could say, you know, there was this entire category of SaaS that you could call like no-code. and I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm a yes code company because I'm now saying coding agents basically make the code free.

12. 31:10

    And so why not buy, you know, the lethal combination there is that you buy Vercel as a platform and then you never have to buy software again because you can just generate it to your needs. Okay, so where do the sales forces and SAPs, et cetera, of the world fit in? Well, software needs data. I can generate the most beautiful like meeting prep or report or all of these awesome things that you can deploy on for sale websites applications agents but they need to get their data from somewhere and so I think the sources of record the where does the customer history live where does the contact live where do my meeting notes live where do my support tickets live. That's critical data infrastructure. I'm not going to call it software because you use the word headless. What does headless mean? Well, headless means that we no longer

13. 32:07

    go to the head ourselves. The agent can go and get the data out of the system and then either create new software, create new visualizations of the data, et cetera. So in a way, the entire world of software is changing. And in a way, I think some of the fundamental pillars will still