Vercel cuts inbound SDR team from 10 to 1.25, sees 32x ROI

Vercel's experience, as described by COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, comes after sales development was one of the early use cases for AI. The article compares the delayed payoff to self-driving cars, noting that fulfillment required more time before Waymo could navigate the streets of the Inner Sunset. It also points out a coincidence: Waymos reduce pedestrian collisions by 92%, nearly identical to the figures above. Grosser's account suggests that for Vercel, the original promises of AI in sales development have now been kept, with a 90% automation rate for inbound, a support agent handling 93% of cases, and a 32x ROI on the sales development agent. She frames the constraint as the codified workflow rather than the model. The outcome hinges on whether other teams can replicate that workflow design, and on how the economics shift as model costs change. Grosser is scheduled to discuss what happens to the sales development function when the inbound agent manages leads itself at Theory Office Hours on Wednesday, September 16th at 9:30 AM PT.