Vercel CEO says AI agents are turning us all into 'mini CEOs'
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Village Global
- Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said that AI agents are turning everyone into "mini CEOs."
- He said the days of individual contributors, who don't manage anyone (or anything), are over.
- "My mental model right now is that the IC is the agent," Rauch said on a recent podcast.
It's time to boss up.
In the age of AI agents, companies are restructuring their org charts to make room for these new, digital workers. Some say that will make every human employee a manager. Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch says it'll make us all CEOs.
Outset Capital general partner Ali Rhode asked Rauch on her new podcast "10 Minutes or Less," which generously features interviews that are under 10 minutes, whether he missed being a so-called individual contributor, or IC, which is an employee who doesn't manage anyone. He said no, and that the role was probably not long for this world.
"My mental model right now is that the IC is the agent," Rauch said.
For those who identified too strongly with a single skill, Rauch said he had "bad news." An agent might be better than they are at that skill, he said.
AI agents are getting more skillful every day. Software engineering jobs, in particular, have changed dramatically thanks to tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw.
This is the era of "leverage," Rauch said. Why write lines of code when we could have agentic leverage, he asked. "We're all kind of mini CEOs at this point," he said.
This kind of agent manager is all the rage. Instead of overseeing a group of human employees, some companies are hiring managers to oversee a collection of bots. Agents are already upending org charts and changing the role of middle managers.
Vercel itself last year reduced its 10-person sales team down to one person managing a bot.
Rhode asked: "So no one is going to be an IC anymore?"
"No one is an IC anymore," Rauch responded.