# Vercel gives employees one agent as a front door

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/vercel-gives-employees-one-agent-as-a-front-door/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Guillermo Rauch](https://realalpha.app/builders/guillermo-rauch/) · Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel. · Founded Vercel, which created Next.js and the v0 AI tool for building websites.
- Host: [Nakul Mandan](https://realalpha.app/people/nakul-mandan/) · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul · General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build.
- Show: Knuckle Up with Nakul
- Episode: [Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode" | Guillermo Rauch (CEO)](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/), Aug 25, 2026
- Moment: 35:40 to 42:19 of the episode (7 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/vercel-gives-employees-one-agent-as-a-front-door/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2140

## Quote

> “At the end of the day, for an agent to be successful, it has to be like the iPhone. There's just **one place to go**.”
> — [Guillermo Rauch](https://realalpha.app/builders/guillermo-rauch/) at [37:54](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2274) · Knuckle Up with Nakul

## Takeaways

1. A single interface makes it easier for everyone to use agents.
2. V connects to specialist agents, skills, and company knowledge.
3. Agent demand exposes infrastructure limits and deployment bottlenecks.

## About this segment

Guillermo Rauch explains why Vercel built V as a shared entry point to company knowledge, tasks, and specialist agents. The approach aims to raise the floor for AI use and reduce queues.

From “Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode" | Guillermo Rauch (CEO)”, Aug 25, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/)

## Transcript

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

[35:47](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2147) There's a theoretical possibility already today that everybody's a builder and everybody can do more to automate and 10x themselves. But when I talk to CEOs, they're seeing a huge spectrum even in their own organizations around, like, is every marketer 10xing themselves? Is every finance person 10xing themselves? No, they're finding that, of course, engineering is deeper, but like there's top 5% people in every organization, even in the AI organizations that are really 10xing themselves and 95% are still lagging.

[36:17](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2177) Two questions. One is, are you finding that at Vercel? Maybe not because of the technical nature, but I'm curious. And second is, how much of that is just a cultural upheaval that every company has to go through? Because the 5%, the delta between the top 5% and the next 95% has multiplied. No, this is real. Even at Vercel. Well, so here's how we're solving this. So what we noticed is most organizations said, in order to superpower my organization with AI, I'll give everybody a cloud subscription.

[36:46](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2206) And then the divergence started. You have this prompt library and you follow Route G on X and you have skills and whatever. And that other person just like prompts, clocks in, clocks out. And so how do I raise the floor? How do I make everyone build on a platform? so maybe we didn't have this problem as drastically as some of the anecdotes that i've heard literally i heard from one of our customers that they invite ai ceos to do fireside chats to inspire the organization how to use agents because people don't even use them and so they want to hear the success stories and things like that maybe they're skeptical i don't know but what we did is we created an internal agent that is in a self-improvement loop this is the one you renounce four days ago. Yeah. So I told the story because what we announced is Eve. We announced the

[37:39](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2259) framework of how you can build an agent to run your organization. And our own internal agent is called V. And so instead of having people all over the place go to Chachapiti over here and go to Claude over there, they go to V. And this is to us a culmination on a lot of like scars, lessons learned, trial and error. At the end of the day, for an agent to be successful, it has to be like the iPhone. There's just one place to go. I can call, I can text, I can play video games, I can do anything with this thing. But I just know, I take it out of my pocket.

[38:15](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2295) One interface. That's the future of agents. We used to call this the omni-agent project. We want to have one front door so that everyone in the company, when you don't know something, when you want a job to be automated, when you have a question about the business, when you have a question about a customer, or even when you want something automated, you can go to V. And under the hood, V has a collection of agents, applications, capabilities, crucially skills, and a team that maintains it.

[38:47](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2327) What you just described, I believe in it, but at the same time you earlier said you don't believe it's the end of SaaS. But why will somebody log into a CRM ever? Why will somebody log into a Zendesk? I'll always talk to V. Okay, so great questions. So for example, I literally just approved some spend for a sales and marketing platform today that plugs into V. And yesterday I gave feedback to one of my colleagues that one of our content solutions, it takes too long because it was not designed for agent interoperability.

[39:17](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2357) So I'm literally reconfiguring all of my priors. I used to think your software is good or bad based on, I don't know, the website is fast. It has a lot of features. I can click around and it works reliably. Now that's all table stakes, of course. But the thing that is making some platform spike is their ability to interoperate with the Vs of the world. And if you're not good with Vs, I actually like, I have a few vendors in the chopping block, like literally because of their inability to, and by the way, it's subtle things sometimes because maybe they do have an MCP, But their MCP takes, I don't know, 2,000 tool calls and it fails a lot.

[39:59](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2399) And they just, they didn't put, you know that they check the box. You know that they're either late to market and they're trying to play catch up or you know that their infrastructure doesn't hold up. So this one is fascinating, right? Like literally today, it was a major GitHub outage. And I have a lot of love for what that product has done and what that platform has done for the world and have a lot of friends there.

[40:23](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2423) But the reality is that their infrastructure has not been able to hold up with the agentic demand. And that has become a bottleneck for us. And so I see this pattern a lot because what has happened is a lot of software maybe did present the right API, maybe did present the right interface. And now you have a billion agents querying it at 100 requests per second. And so it's airing a lot of dirty laundry.

[40:49](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2449) You know, we used to say, come to Vercel because you're going to need this elastic serverless compute capability. And so people would say, no, you know what, I don't think I need that. Well, look at this. From week to week, agents can 100x your load. Our own load has doubled in a couple of months. And so sometimes, you know, obviously not every piece of infrastructure is perfect, but some of the key bets that we placed, I'm really thankful for because no one could have predicted.

[41:18](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2478) this massive acceleration. And what's probably happening at a lot of companies is that someone has an agent and is deploying to Vercel and is deploying to the homegrown legacy platform. And the agent is just going and going and going. And the Vercel one is delightful. And the legacy one literally gets replaced. So a lot of companies are finding this with their, I mentioned that marketing company. Can your platform where you deploy software absorb the creative demands that all of these coding agents have unleashed?

[41:52](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=2512) Most of the time, the answer is no. It's like I gave you a Ferrari. I was like, here's cursor. It can do anything. All right, deploy. Oh, I just went into a two-week queue or I can't deploy an internal tool or an agent. And so there was that impedance mismatch that obviously has fortunately really favored us. Let's shift towards how AI has changed Vercel and how it operates.