Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch: Models and Agents Should Be Decoupled
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch argues that AI agents and models should not be too tightly coupled, and tools like Eve and Sandbox help with data control and auditing challenges.
Vercel, known for its cloud infrastructure that lets developers deploy agents without managing servers, has quietly become a central player in AI software. The company now sees 6 million deployments a day, half triggered by coding agents, and over 1 trillion tokens flow through its AI gateway daily.
After Vercel’s ShipNYC conference last week, TechCrunch spoke with CEO Guillermo Rauch about the current AI landscape. He noted that last year was about prototyping, but now the focus is on making things work in practice. The biggest lesson was identifying two killer apps for agents: coding agents and internal corporate agents. For internal agents, challenges include secure data access, auditing, and tracking tool calls.
To address these, Vercel developed Eve, a framework that lets agents be given instructions and skills in natural language, and Vercel Sandbox, a caged environment with policies on data access. The sandbox’s main advantage is data control, preventing risks like coding IDEs (e.g., Devin, Cursor) training on the entire codebase. Rauch cited an example of Airbus having decades of C++ code that should not be used for training.
As an example of an internal agent, a sales rep can use Eve to ask which accounts are growing fastest without waiting for a new sales dashboard. Rauch admitted he was previously incompetent with Salesforce, but now Eve improves productivity across the company.
Rauch believes agents force companies to open up, as SaaS giants that trap data are incompatible with agents. Clients no longer pick a single lab partner; they prefer a plug-and-play approach: model, harness, data platform, sandbox, gateway. Gemini is growing due to price/performance, and open models like DeepSeek and GLM-5.2 are taking off.
When asked about competition with big labs, Rauch noted that OpenAI recently released tools that let users publish directly to the web within its enclave. Vercel sees this as an opportunity, as people using ChatGPT for websites may ask about hosting. Rauch argues that models and agents should be decoupled: take a module or building block from one provider and build on top. Vercel aims to be the AWS of this generation and advocates for open protocols.
