The $999,000 Automation

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO

Over the weekend, I listened to Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Vercel’s COO. The numbers from one story are worth paying attention to: six weeks, one engineer working maybe 25-30% of his time, built an AI agent that now does the work of nine full-time SDRs handling inbound lead qualification.

Annual cost to run the agent: roughly $1,000. Previous cost for those nine SDRs: well over $1 million in salaries.

The agent maintains the same lead-to-opportunity conversion rate the humans did, and actually does it faster because leads don’t sit in queues overnight. By the way, those nine SDRs weren’t fired. They got moved to outbound prospecting, work that actually uses their full capacity instead of the repetitive inbound grind.

But the economics are just the opening act.

Vercel built a second agent—the “deal-bot”—that runs against every Gong transcript, every Slack message, every email in their sales process. When their biggest Q2 loss came in, the account executive coded …