Agents in the Wild

Vercel's lead agent took inbound qualification from a 10-person team to about one person

Vercel built an agent that researches and qualifies inbound sales leads. A GTM engineer shadowed the best SDR, copied her workflow, and ran the agent in shadow mode before going live.

Organization
Vercel
Industry
Developer Platform
When
2025
Evidence
Press report
Agents and tools
Custom agent (Vercel AI SDK)

Reported outcome

Inbound SDR work went from about 10 people to 1 plus a part-time person; the agent costs about $5,000 a year to run (as reported).

  • ~10 → ~1
    SDR team
  • ~$5,000/yr
    Run cost
  • ~20% of one engineer
    Maintenance

Caveats

Reported by a news outlet, usually based on company statements.

  • Numbers come from a conference talk by Vercel's COO, reported by SaaStr.
  • Team-size figures differ between sources.

What the agent does

When a lead comes in, the agent researches the company and person, scores fit, and drafts a reply or routes the lead. A human checks edge cases.

How they built it

A three-person team: a GTM engineer, a data scientist, and the best SDR as the subject-matter expert. The engineer watched every tab the SDR opened for several days. The agent then ran in shadow mode, with the SDR reviewing its output, before it took over.

What to copy

  • Copy your best person's workflow, not a generic one.
  • Run in shadow mode until the expert agrees with most decisions.
  • Pick work with high repetition and low judgment. Vercel calls this the sweet spot.

Starter prompt

Written by us, not by Vercel.

New inbound lead: {name}, {email}, {company}, message: "{message}"

1. Research the company: size, industry, tech stack signals, recent news.
   Cite a URL for each fact.
2. Score fit 1-5 against this ICP: {icp}. Explain in 2 sentences.
3. Route: 4-5 → draft a reply offering a call; 2-3 → send the
   self-serve resources email; 1 → no action.
4. If anything looks like spam or a competitor, flag it for a human.

Sources

  1. Vercel took a 10-person SDR team down to 1 — SaaStr, 2025
  2. What we learned building agents at Vercel — Vercel, Nov 2025

Added Oct 16, 2026. Spotted an error? Send a correction.

Get new use cases weekly

One short email. Sources included.

Related use cases