Vercel: AI lead agent matched human conversion rate with fewer touches
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser · What world-class GTM looks like in 2026 | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Vercel, Stripe, Google) · Nov 30, 2025 · at 21:28
Vercel COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser discusses the performance metrics of their automated inbound AI agent versus human SDRs.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What we were able to do is Hold that lead to opportunity conversion rate flat so the agent is as good as our humans were, but it's actually condensed the number of touches it takes to convert Because it's so much quicker at responding relative to leads inevitably sitting in the queue or coming in at nighttime and no one, you know, can get to it”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jeanne DeWitt Grosser
Vercel replaced a $1M SDR team with a $1,000 AI agent
“That lead agent, which runs full stack on Purcell, will cost us about a thousand dollars to run for the entire year. So if you remember, I told you we had 10 people in the SDR function, so I'm paying well over a million dollars for that from a salary perspecti…”
Grosser: The 17 hyper-specialized GTM roles are going to collapse
“So we've gone through a period of like hyper specialization and go to market you know, depending on how you count them, there are, you know, I think somebody quoted like 17 different, ah, roles within go to market these days. And I hypothesize that a lot of th…”
Grosser: AI agents could double salespeople's customer-facing time to 70%
“And I think we're getting to a point where With layering in agents, ideally, we finally get salespeople to a point where they're actually spending 70% of their time interacting with humans, and we can get the research, the follow-up, the things that are a litt…”
Grosser: Average SDRs Are Capable of Starting Directly in Closing Roles
“But I think the average SDR Could have gone straight into outbound or straight into an S&P closing role. And so basically what we're just doing is shifting folks into something that uses more of their full capacity right out of the gates, rather than sort of t…”
AI analysis revealed Vercel's biggest lost deal wasn't actually about price
“So the biggest loss that quarter, according to the account executive, was lost on price. And when you ran the agent over every Slack interaction, every email, every gone call, it said, actually you lost because you never really got in touch with the economic b…”
Grosser: Company context makes bespoke internal AI agents superior to vendor software
“Because this whole space is so nascent, often your own esoteric context, you know, your content, your workflow is really key to unlocking the power of the agent. And so I think there's real value in experimenting with your own internal agent development.”