After several years of vendor promises built around half-baked demos that led to stalled projects, enterprises around the world figured out how to deploy AI agents in 2026. That surge in activity has forced many infrastructure providers to rethink how they serve their customers, and Vercel thinks it's time to get back to basics.
"Every organization is going to have to start exposing their data and their capabilities through APIs, through MCPs, and through CLIs [command-line interfaces]," Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told The Stack in a recent interview. "And when you host those workloads, that's not the same as hosting websites and serving them through the CDN [content-delivery network].
Vercel has raised $863 million over the last ten years to build out a development platform for front-end web applications, but a lot has changed over the past few years. The next shift in agentic AI is getting those agents to run reliably and consistently over the long haul, and the $9.3 billion company is evolving its product lineup to meet that demand.
At its annual Vercel Ship developer conference Thursday, Rauch plans to introduce several new services with that goal in mind. Vercel Daemons, "a new compute offering [that] runs always-on background processes" according to a company representative, will enter public beta, and it will also introduce Vercel Drives, which "gives agents persistent workspaces" so that "code, data, and saved memory can persist independently of an individual sandbox, allowing agents to pick up work across runs rather than rebuild their environment each time."
"The next chapter of Vercel, the workload shape is going to be a backend, it's going to be an API server," Rauch said. "It's going to be a lot more long-running."
In the interview, he also touched on the notion of AI consciousness, the future of Node.js after Cloudflare's acquisition of Deno, and more.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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