Vercel Ship 2026 recap

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch opened Ship SF with a vision for agentic infrastructure, emphasizing interfaces generated for tasks, autonomous bug-fixing agents, and software that continuously improves using production context. He highlighted Vercel’s role as the deployment target for coding agents, citing over 200 CLI commands that enable agents to operate the platform autonomously. The company positions itself as the infrastructure layer where agents build, deploy, and run software securely at scale, with automated observability and pull requests surfaced by agents rather than alerts.

Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, demonstrated unified deployment of frontends, APIs, containers, and MCP servers, announcing Python’s general availability on Vercel. He introduced Vercel Services for co-deploying frontends and backends with full app previews, and Vercel Daemons in public beta for continuously running background workers with automatic failover. The updates aim to streamline production workflows for both applications and agentic systems.

Tomo Occhino, CPO of Vercel, detailed the Agent Stack’s latest features, including eve’s persistent memory, MCP Events in public beta, and Vercel Connect’s over 1,000 connectors. AI Gateway now supports budget controls for API keys and teams, US-only inference, and Zero Data Retention. Vercel Token Pass offers $80 in GLM 5.3 and Kimi K3 token credit for $30/month in early access, with additional models planned. Vercel Drives, generally available for Sandbox, provides persistent agent workspaces that retain code and memory across runs.

Jeanne Grosser, COU of Vercel, outlined controls for company-wide deployment, including BYOC on AWS for running functions in customers’ own accounts and Enterprise-Managed Authorization for Vercel Connect in public beta. The event drew over 2,700 attendees to San Francisco, featuring sessions on agent testing, performance optimization, and real-world deployments by companies like Ora, Anthropic, Meta, and Slack.