Molly O’Shea@MollySOSheaOct 16

BREAKING: 60% of Vercel deployments are now driven by AI agents, up from 3% in Jan 2026. FULL INTERVIEW Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg), Founder & CEO @Vercel Stats: › 80% of AI Gateway token volume comes from open models › 10 years to reach 1B deployments, then another 1.5B in just 10 months "The machines have taken over." I sat down with G at Vercel's SF HQ to discuss how AI is changing software development, infrastructure & the economics of SaaS. Vercel has reportedly reached $600M in annualized revenue, up 148% YoY, with 485K+ paying teams and a $9.3B valuation. Customers include SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta, Stripe, Brex, Shopify, DoorDash, & Polymarket. P.S. Guillermo mentions "code" 145 times throughout our conversation. His thesis is that AI agents are making code effectively free, fundamentally changing what companies build versus buy. "You buy Vercel as the platform, & then you never have to buy software again because you can just generate it to your needs." We cover: › The shift from human-facing websites to agent-native interfaces, MCP & agentic commerce with Stripe, Shopify & DoorDash › Why free code changes SaaS economics for Salesforce & SAP, software development & the role of engineers at Meta, SpaceX & Mercedes F1 › Open vs. closed models, including why ~80% of token volume on Vercel’s AI Gateway now goes to open models like Moonshot’s Kimi & DeepSeek › Unpacking frontier: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini & xAI › Agent autonomy, prompt injection, sandboxing & enterprise security after OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach › Model routing, growing compute demand & the future of serverless infrastructure 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO at Vercel (03:32) The simplest advice for going viral (07:24) How Vercel became the index of AI (11:34) The CEO who still ships code on weekends (14:34) Robots writing code for robots (17:57) The web's next users aren't human (21:15) Is ChatGPT reading your website right now? (24:21) Minority Report is becoming real software (29:16) The end of SaaS & the rise of personal software (34:07) AI agents are soldiers with no frontal lobe (45:42) AI hackers & the coming cyber war (47:55) The $1M challenge to hack Vercel's sandbox (52:10) 80% of tokens now go to open models (59:00) The biggest risk for frontier labs (1:04:00) Can AI labs survive the public markets? (1:06:28) Why AI has Silicon Valley working 7-7-7 (1:07:23) "The thing you fell in love with is gone" (1:16:56) Your vibe-coded demo won't get you hired (1:22:22) The hardest part of running a company is keeping it simple (1:27:01) Why no company can run all its AI apps 24/7