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Start free trial →Marketing Against The Grain · Media & Creator Economy · November 2026
Kieran Flanagan asked what worked and what didn't when Vercel built a prospecting agent. Vercel's COO says agents now do the research while carefully written templates carry the positioning.
Awesome. I'm thrilled to be here.
…but like prospecting agent, because I think you all have had a bunch of success there. You have a whole wealth of experience in selling as well. And I kind of just want to kind of ask what worked, what didn't work, and kind of what did you learn trying to instrument a prospecting agent at Vercel?
At the outset, we arguably let the agent take the wheel too much. And so we sort of gave it full drafting rights, which we ended up pulling back on because we sort of realized like, I don't really want Claude deciding my value prop, right? Like
that's kind of
my job as a go-to-market organization. And so we now intermix much more, let the agent do research, but let it then use templates that, you know, we just like classical, you know, sales and marketing, we have carefully crafted that ensure that we're capturing the right value prop and positioning…
Okay. So today it's a fully fledged prospecting agent. It qualifies your inbound demand, reaches out and tries to book a meeting with a rep. And a couple of the things you learned actually are pretty interesting in that you kind of didn't want AI deciding how to pitch. And so you kind of…