{
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "passage": {
    "id": "vercel-vertex-300-month-three-engineers-off-the-shelf-2026",
    "text": "Then there's Vertex. This is our customer service agent, … Vertex costs us $300 a month in infrastructure, plus 12,000 in tokens. It's $150k a year. It operates at significant scale, handling thousands of technical cases a week. And three engineers work on it, three. We started with an off-the-shelf solution, but weren't seeing enough results. We built something … in two months and had it in production.",
    "context": "Vercel's COO describes Vertex, the internal customer service agent behind its help page, as an example of building rather than buying.",
    "speaker": "Jeanne DeWitt Grosser",
    "speakerId": "jeanne-dewitt-grosser",
    "speakerUrl": "https://the-ai-record.com/people/jeanne-dewitt-grosser",
    "speakerLevel": "executive",
    "role": "Chief Operating Officer, Vercel",
    "voice": "person",
    "organization": "Vercel",
    "organizationId": "vercel",
    "organizationUrl": "https://the-ai-record.com/organizations/vercel",
    "aiVendor": true,
    "work": {
      "title": "Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO",
      "type": "talk",
      "date": "2026-11-04",
      "publisher": "SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026",
      "locator": "16:21",
      "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXHLbr4W-8s"
    },
    "grade": "B",
    "gradeMeaning": "The organization's own post, paper or talk.",
    "verification": {
      "status": "verified",
      "meaning": "An independent second reader re-fetched the source and confirmed the wording.",
      "reviewedOn": "2026-11-08"
    },
    "topics": [
      "support-cost",
      "internal-tools"
    ],
    "functions": [
      "support"
    ],
    "figures": [
      {
        "metric": "support-agent-annual-run-cost",
        "value": 150000,
        "unit": "usd",
        "period": "per year, as spoken",
        "definition": "what the speaker says Vertex costs a year: $300 a month for infrastructure plus 12,000 in tokens; she does not say whether the tokens figure is monthly",
        "level": "n/a"
      },
      {
        "metric": "support-agent-engineers",
        "value": 3,
        "unit": "people",
        "period": "as of the talk, 2026",
        "definition": "engineers who work on Vertex",
        "level": "n/a"
      },
      {
        "metric": "support-agent-build-time",
        "value": 2,
        "unit": "months",
        "period": "as spoken",
        "definition": "time to build Vertex in house and put it into production, after an off-the-shelf product fell short",
        "level": "n/a"
      }
    ],
    "url": "https://the-ai-record.com/passages/vercel-vertex-300-month-three-engineers-off-the-shelf-2026",
    "json": "https://the-ai-record.com/api/v1/passages/vercel-vertex-300-month-three-engineers-off-the-shelf-2026.json"
  },
  "notice": [
    "Every passage is reproduced word for word from the cited source.",
    "Check the verification status: \"reported\" means not yet confirmed by an independent second reader.",
    "Organizations flagged aiVendor sell AI tools or services and have a reason to publish flattering numbers.",
    "An empty result means the archive holds nothing on it, not that nobody has said anything."
  ]
}