Guillermo Rauch
- Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch says the internet will be full of AI agents, and they must be hosted somewhere.
- He said Vercel is building what he calls an “AI cloud” to do just that.
- Software now runs and thinks for hours, and Vercel wants to power that shift, Rauch said.
The internet is starting to fill up with AI agents, and they’ll need to be hosted somewhere, says CEO Guillermo Rauch.
The CEO of the cloud-based platform said in an interview published on TBPN Monday that “the world is going from pages to agents.”
To prepare for that shift, Rauch said Vercel is building what he calls “the AI cloud.” That refers to infrastructure designed to host autonomous agents that can plan, reason, and act independently.
“Every type of software will become AI native software, and the new primitive of the cloud will be the agent,” he said.
Vercel is building new frameworks and developer tools to support this next wave of AI software, Rauch said. The company, which powers millions of web apps, raised $300 million at a $9.3 billion valuation in September to fuel that push.
Many companies will bypass the digital transformation playbook and move directly to AI agents, Rauch said. He added that these agents are already changing how online infrastructure works.
“Software is running for a lot longer, which is fascinating from a compute standpoint,” he said.
“We’re seeing all of these new types of software that are just running, like thinking and producing, obviously demanding tokens, but running for minutes, hours, days.”
Vercel’s chief operating officer, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, told Business Insider in a report on Monday that the company is training AI agents on the work of its top performers.
Grosser said Vercel’s “lead agent” handles the work that used to require multiple sales development reps, allowing the company to cut a 10-person team to just one person and a bot.
Rauch did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The era of the agentic internet
AI agents are poised to reshape the internet, automating everything from bookings to payments.
The foundations for this new agentic web are being built as tech companies race to claim and establish the early infrastructure.
OpenAI launched its ChatGPT-powered browser, Atlas, last week. The browser merges internet navigation with the capabilities of agentic AI, and can do basic tasks for users like booking appointments and filling grocery carts.
In April, Google launched Agent2Agent, a protocol designed to let AI agents talk to one another, share data securely, and coordinate actions across different business systems.
Anthropic, the maker of Claude, rolled out its Model Context Protocol, or MCP, last November. It links agents to backend systems like databases, pricing engines, and workflows, and replaces the patchwork of APIs and integrations that power most commerce online.
Last month, Cloudflare said it plans to introduce NET Dollar, a US dollar-backed stablecoin meant to support secure transactions for the emerging agentic web.
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