Interview, Fireside Chat
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on Building the Internet for Agents
- Agents are projected to become the dominant mode of software creation, with deployment choices and correctness expected to be automated, surging by 1.5 billion deployments in the next 10 months to surpass the first billion reached over the prior decade.
- Agentic activity on the platform is expected to rise from 3% to 60% of all deployments by year-end, while internet traffic increasingly shifts toward agents acting on behalf of humans for tasks ranging from information retrieval to direct purchasing of services like those from Stripe and Shopify.
- Future interfaces and software delivery are predicted to transform entirely toward agent-centric interaction, replacing human-facing models with generative, context-aware profiles and "headless" systems where agents retrieve data from sources of record to build custom applications.
- New protocols such as MCP for tool access and machine-specific commerce layers will replace HTML, enabling autonomous agent-to-agent transactions and requiring businesses to provide structured data like podcast transcripts for agent retrieval.
- Enterprise interactions with systems like Salesforce will increasingly utilize agents to bypass traditional interfaces, while model selection strategies will shift toward fluid portfolios utilizing open models for 80% of enterprise traffic and allowing one-line swaps between providers to avoid vendor lock-in.
- Compute demands are expected to increase exponentially, driving the evolution of "fluid compute" technology where servers spin down automatically, though this creates significant infrastructure challenges regarding network, energy, and grid capacity.
- Significant cybersecurity risks are anticipated, including prompt injection attacks via public content, vulnerabilities in legacy human-written code, and state-sponsored token deployments, necessitating a "war between good tokens and bad tokens" and a shift toward mathematically provable code.
- Business transformation is deemed critical, with a prediction that entities failing to adapt their websites and operations for agents will miss the current economic opportunity, while workforce roles will shift toward developers acting as "capital allocators" and sales engineers requiring heightened technical proficiency.
- Model economics face volatility with potential zero loyalty among providers unable to sustain viability, prompting Vercel to guarantee zero data retention for enterprise customers and support a mix of frontier and open models to manage risk.
- The outlook emphasizes that iteration velocity, rather than raw speed, constitutes the primary value proposition, with the belief that refusing to implement AI or open models is the most detrimental strategy for businesses in the coming decade.