When Inbound Sells Itself | Tomasz Tunguz
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Tomasz Tunguz
Venture Capitalist at
Theory Ventures
When Inbound Sells Itself
September 15, 2026 · 2 min read
AI
sales
startups
In short :
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, COO of Vercel, reports 90% automation of inbound sales development, a support agent handling 93% of cases, a 32x ROI on the sales development agent, & a total annual infrastructure bill in the single-digit thousands. Vercel took its inbound SDR team from 10 to 1.25. The bottleneck is not the model, it is the codified workflow.
Vercel took its inbound sales development team from 10 people to 1.25.
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser
, COO of Vercel, shared this on our Information interview together
1
:
“We had 90% automation of sales development for inbound. And our support agent that we’ve home-built handles 93% of all support cases…
In both of those cases, the total annual infrastructure bill is in the single-digit thousands…
Our sales development agent is a 32x ROI. So it’s worth it, no matter how much that model costs…
There are many ways in which we’re now getting AI to sort of be a 99th percentile performer 99% of the time.”
Sales development was one of the immediate use cases for AI in the early days.
Like self-driving cars, the promise arrived & fulfillment required a bit more time until the Waymo could navigate the streets of the Inner Sunset. It’s a coincidence that Waymos reduce pedestrian collisions by 92%, nearly identical to the figures above
2
.
Today, AI is in a place where the original promises have now been kept.
On Thursday, October 1st at 11:00 AM PT, Theory Office Hours welcomes
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser
of Vercel to talk about what happens to the sales development function when the inbound agent manages leads itself. If you’d like to attend,
please register here
.
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser on The Information’s TITV
. Detail on the 10→1.25 compression from
SaaStrAI’s coverage of the same session
.
↩︎
Waymo, New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer for those most at risk
, May 1 2025. The study reports a 92% reduction in injury-involving pedestrian crashes, with 82% for cyclists & motorcyclists.
↩︎
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