Smash Notes

Why Does Guillermo Rauch Skip Salesforce for Slack?

at 26:25

From the episode: Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on Building the Internet for Agents

Answer

Guillermo Rauch says almost everything at Vercel now runs through agents. He prepares for a customer meeting on Slack and never opens Salesforce himself. The agent goes to Salesforce.

He laid out the contrast after speaking at a Salesforce conference. Salesforce was built as a product for humans: a list of contacts and a CRM on a pixel interface. On Slack he can say he is the account executive, ask how often Molly deploys on Vercel, and request a quick report on problems she reported. He does not have to learn 20 different tools. In Palo Alto, teams used to gather in a room and freeze a profile picture and support tickets into one layout a product design team had already chosen. The Vercel agent that helps prepare the sales force and customer support teams is generative. A question about a person renders a profile. A question about a company brings contextual information about the company. Rauch says he may not want a beginner sales development representative to get the same sophistication he wants to give his finance team. He wants to give the finance team an outlook of the business. Agents can solve for the split in what each role sees. Websites, traditional pages, and pixels could not. Vercel is helping a new generation of software be easy to build and ship to companies.

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