The AI Record
We had a GTM engineer, as I mentioned, shadow one of our best SDRs for a few days. … Watching every single tab she opened, … The engineer converted each of those data sources into a step in a tool calling workflow. … After building our first version, … ran in production in shadow mode for six weeks. Our best SDR reviewed every single output to create a feedback flywheel. And then finally, she couldn't improve it anymore. The architecture reflects exactly what she was doing manually. But now, it performs like the 90th percentile rep, 100% of the time. We applied the same framework to 30 different SDR workflows, … SDR quotas increased by 30% this quarter.

Jeanne DeWitt GrosserChief Operating Officer, Vercel · Executive, Vercel

Context. Vercel's COO describes how her team built the lead qualification agent, step by step, and what followed.

Talk: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, November 4, 2026, at 15:00.

  • 6 weeks sdr agent shadow period, first version, as spoken. A person approves
  • 30 workflows sdr workflows automated, as of the talk, 2026. Level not stated
  • 30% sdr quota increase, this quarter, as spoken

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Vercel: $600 million revenue, annualized, as of 2026-10 Sells AI tools

Filed under

Who is speaking

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Chief Operating Officer. Runs operations at Vercel and created the go-to-market engineering team behind its internal agents, so she is in a position to know their cost and staffing; she speaks as an executive of a company that sells AI tooling.

Vercel sells AI or agent tools or services, so it has a reason to publish flattering numbers about AI. The passage stays in the archive; read it with that in mind.

How this was checked

Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-08).

Every fragment between the '…' markers matches whisper word for word near 15:00, including '90th percentile rep' and 'SDR quotas increased by 30% this quarter'.

How to cite this passage

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Vercel), “Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO”, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, 2026-11-04, at 15:00. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXHLbr4W-8s Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/vercel-shadow-best-sdr-six-weeks-90th-percentile-2026

More from the same source

Probably the most popular agent at Vercel used by the entire company is D0. D0 is a data analyst agent that everyone at Vercel can access via Slack. Questions that used to take a week to ticket and get an answer back to from the data science team can now be answered in less than a minute.

Jeanne DeWitt GrosserChief Operating Officer, Vercel · Executive, Vercel

Context. Vercel's COO describes D0, an internal agent in Slack, in the part of the talk on why agents need a strong data foundation.

Talk: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, November 4, 2026, at 12:01.

  • 1 weeks data question turnaround before, before D0, as spoken
  • 1 minutes data question turnaround after, with D0, as spoken. Level not stated

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Vercel: $600 million revenue, annualized, as of 2026-10 Sells AI tools Passage page

To give you some perspective, the lead qualification agent that I opened with costs us under $5,000 a year between infrastructure and tokens to run. It takes about 20% of one engineer to maintain it. That's a 32x ROI. … It's now $5,000 and it operates 24/7 with faster speed to lead and all the quality of human equivalent metrics.

Jeanne DeWitt GrosserChief Operating Officer, Vercel · Executive, Vercel

Context. Vercel's COO, making the case that agents change the build-versus-buy decision, gives the running cost of the lead qualification agent she described at the start.

Talk: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, November 4, 2026, at 14:05.

  • $5,000 lead agent annual run cost, per year, as spoken
  • 32 x lead agent roi multiple, as spoken
  • 20% lead agent maintenance engineer share, as spoken

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Vercel: $600 million revenue, annualized, as of 2026-10 Sells AI tools Passage page

So we launched a lead qualification agent back in August of last year. We started that with about 20% of a single engineer working on that agent. And with a human in the loop over the course of six weeks, we're able to completely move … our team of 10 on that function down to one.

Jeanne DeWitt GrosserChief Operating Officer, Vercel · Executive, Vercel

Context. Vercel's COO describes the first agent her go-to-market engineering team shipped, for sales development.

Talk: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, November 4, 2026, at 01:33.

  • 10 people sdr lead qualification team size, before the agent, as spoken
  • 1 people sdr lead qualification team size after, after six weeks with a human in the loop, as spoken. AI assists a person
  • 20% lead agent engineer share, at launch, as spoken

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Vercel: $600 million revenue, annualized, as of 2026-10 Sells AI tools Passage page

We now still have one person running that in the U.S. And then about 20% of a person doing all of Europe and all of APAC. And when this came out, people decried the end of the knowledge worker. But for us, really … what we did was to shift all of those people into more valuable roles.

Jeanne DeWitt GrosserChief Operating Officer, Vercel · Executive, Vercel

Context. Continues the account of the lead qualification agent, right after a sponsor break in the recording. 'That' is the lead qualification work.

Talk: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, November 4, 2026, at 02:57.

  • 1 people lead agent us staffing, as of the talk, 2026
  • 0.2 people lead agent europe apac staffing, as of the talk, 2026

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Vercel: $600 million revenue, annualized, as of 2026-10 Sells AI tools Passage page

we now have automated, actually, a decent number of core functions within the company. For example, our customer support agent, and you can imagine at Vercel, a lot of our cases are complicated and highly technical, now handles 93% of total caseload. Similarly, our content agent is used heavily by the marketing organization and did 96% of our major content updates last quarter.

Jeanne DeWitt GrosserChief Operating Officer, Vercel · Executive, Vercel

Context. Opening a SaaStr AI Annual 2026 talk, Vercel's COO lists functions the company says it has automated after ten months of building agents.

Talk: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, November 4, 2026, at 00:54.

  • 93% support agent caseload share, as of the talk, 2026. Level not stated
  • 96% content agent major updates share, last quarter, as spoken. Level not stated

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Vercel: $600 million revenue, annualized, as of 2026-10 Sells AI tools Passage page

What the working model that we've used for all of our internal agent development is basically a tripod. It's a GTM engineer, a data scientist, and then the best person, the best subject matter expert in that function. And they sit down shoulder to shoulder and document the best practice for that particular function and then encode that in workflows that ultimately form an agent. We then keep a human in the loop so that human will basically QA the agent. The agent won't be allowed to autonomously execute its action. And then over time as the subject matter expert has less feedback for the agent, we finally pull that person.

Jeanne DeWitt GrosserChief Operating Officer, Vercel · Executive, Vercel

Context. Vercel's COO explains how her team builds internal agents ('GTM' is go-to-market).

Talk: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, November 4, 2026, at 03:24.

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Vercel: $600 million revenue, annualized, as of 2026-10 Sells AI tools Passage page

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.

Jeanne DeWitt GrosserChief Operating Officer, Vercel · Executive, Vercel

Context. Vercel's COO describes Vertex, the internal customer service agent behind its help page, as an example of building rather than buying.

Talk: Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org with Vercel's COO, SaaStr AI (YouTube); talk at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, November 4, 2026, at 16:21.

  • $150,000 support agent annual run cost, per year, as spoken
  • 3 people support agent engineers, as of the talk, 2026
  • 2 months support agent build time, as spoken

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Vercel: $600 million revenue, annualized, as of 2026-10 Sells AI tools Passage page

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