Vercel's Jeanne DeWitt Grosser: 90% of inbound sales automated

AI sales development was one of the earliest use cases pitched for the technology, but the article compares the gap between that promise and delivery to self-driving cars: it took longer than expected for the capability to arrive, until the Waymo could navigate the streets of the Inner Sunset. Vercel's numbers are the article's evidence that the wait is over. Grosser's figures cover three functions at once — inbound sales development at 90% automation, support at 93% of cases handled by a home-built agent, and an inbound SDR team reduced from 10 people to 1.25 — and she says the total annual infrastructure bill for the sales development and support agents is in the single-digit thousands, with the sales development agent alone returning a 32x ROI. The article's framing puts the constraint not on the model but on the codified workflow, meaning the gain comes from how the work is structured before AI is applied rather than from which model is cheapest. One reading is that the outcome hinges on whether other companies can codify their own workflows as tightly as Vercel appears to have done; the article itself notes that AI is now at a point where the original promises have been kept, and Grosser is set to discuss what happens to the sales development function when the inbound agent manages leads itself.