Vercel Ship Berlin 2026 recap

Vercel Ship Berlin 2026 opened at the Old Mint, “Alte Münze”, where coins were once hammered by hand, before automation took over. It’s also where the JavaScript logo was born, and where Guillermo Rauch (CEO) met Malte Ubl (CTO) for the first time at JSConf EU.

Software is moving the same way, from hand to machine. For a decade, Vercel has shaped how the web is built. Now, we’re doing the same for agents. The companies that win the next decade will build on infrastructure designed for agents from the start. Over 500 people gathered from across Germany to do just that at Vercel Ship Berlin 2026.

Agentic infrastructure

Malte kicked off Ship Berlin by sharing the vision for Vercel: a true full-stack platform where you can deploy anything, including software that can think. We're writing less code by hand, but more ideas are coming to life than ever before.

“Six months ago, less than 3% of Vercel's deployments were triggered by coding agents. Since then, that number has grown 17x.”

Every new generation of software demands a new generation of infrastructure. Websites and apps used to respond to user input with logic; now they have agents inside them that understand intent and act on their own. Agentic software needs agentic infrastructure, and that's exactly what Vercel is building.

Vercel is for shipping agents

The Agent Stack is anchored by AI SDK 7, alongside the AI Gateway, now serving over a trillion tokens a day, Workflow SDK for durable runs, Vercel Sandbox for isolated code execution, and Chat SDK for Slack, Teams, and Google Chat. Vercel Connect gives agents short-lived, scoped access to systems like GitHub and Salesforce with no standing secrets. eve, Vercel's open-source framework, ties the stack together so every agent is a single directory.

Vercel is for shipping full-stack apps

Vercel now runs the whole backend: frameworks like FastAPI, Flask, Express, and Hono, MCP servers and Marketplace databases including Amazon Aurora, Aurora DSQL, DynamoDB, and OpenSearch. The new piece is Vercel Services, launching July 1, which lets you develop and deploy your frontend and backend together with one command, and lets services talk to each other privately, off the public internet. You can run any architecture you want as one app.

Vercel is for shipping in the enterprise

Building agents is the easy part. The hard part is everything around them: access, authentication, and proving it to your security team. Vercel for Enterprise Apps and Agents brings identity, access, and governance to your whole company, with the option to run in your own AWS tenant; Vercel Passport keeps internal apps and agents behind your IdP by default; and Vercel Agent (private beta) watches production, investigates incidents, and opens fixes in PRs you approve.

What’s new: AI SDK 7

Suyog Rao announced AI SDK 7. The AI SDK was created in Berlin and is now downloaded over 16 million times a week. Version 7 turns it into a toolkit for building and running agents that reason, call tools, run across many turns, and work across files and sandboxes, all behind one provider-agnostic interface with no lock-in.

What's new in 7:

• Develop: reasoning control across providers, typed runtime and tool context, and a terminal UI for testing agents before you build a front end

• Run: tool approvals, durable execution that survives deploys and restarts, first-class timeouts, and sandboxed code execution

• Integrate: wrap existing harnesses like Claude Code, Codex, and Pi behind one agent interface

• Observe: redesigned telemetry that traces every model call, step, and tool, with OpenTelemetry support

• Beyond text: image generation and stable speech, plus experimental realtime voice and video

Inside Vercel: 100+ Agents in Production

Vercel now runs more than 100 agents in production, and they are central to how the company operates every day. The lesson from running them, from Abhi: agents are free the way puppies are free. They’re cheap to take home, expensive to keep. Anyone can build an agent. But, someone then has to maintain it, update its models, and keep it working.

A few of those agents we highlighted:

• Vertex (support) resolves 91% of tickets in Slack, Help Center, and Docs.

• D0 (data) gives all Vercel employees 24/7 analytics, 30,000+ questions a month. It writes and runs SQL, and spins up a sandbox to run Python for deeper analysis, always with the asker's own permissions, so it can't surface data they couldn't see themselves.

• Athena (sales) picks accounts, plans outreach, and runs the weekly motion for every account executive. Pipeline coverage doubled after it launched.

• Revoa (revenue ops) pushes record changes into Salesforce with a human in the loop, saving the team nine hours a day.

• Lead Agent (SDR) runs our best rep's playbook 24/7. It took the SDR team from ten to one, with the other nine moved into bigger roles. It performs at the 90th percentile of our reps, costs $5,000 a year, and is open source.

Ship 2026 in Berlin

Ship day sessions

• Philip Miseldine from SAP showed how the company rebuilt its design system to be composable, so people and agents assemble interfaces from the same parts, with v0 running across its build, deliver, and decide stages.

• Building with AI SDK 7 brought three speakers on stage. Lars Grammel, the SDK's creator, went deep on the release, with the new harness layer and generation beyond text as the headline additions. Carsten Høyer (AKQA) demoed the Starbucks ChatGPT app as a "generative store" that composes branded results from Starbucks' own products and visual identity, flipping the funnel so customers pull the brand into their conversation instead of visiting its site. Stephen Batifol (Black Forest Labs) showed where the Flux image models fit in an agentic stack: sub-second generation and editing today, heading toward real-time generation and world models.

• Arthur Viegers from Cursor showed how coding agents move from autocomplete to working across an entire codebase on their own.

• Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz from Vercel showed the mechanics of how software can ship itself, extending the agent loop past development into testing, observability, and experimentation with primitives like Vercel Flags and Skills.

Panel: CTOs on AI and growth

Chris Williams moderated a CTO panel on building and scaling as the cost of creation trends toward zero. A few highlights:

Sven Rosemann (Flaconi): AI won't fix a broken business model, so the work is still operational excellence. He compares ecommerce to a decathlon, you win by being top-tier across every discipline at once. What's changing is discovery, which is moving into chat, so Flaconi is investing in the data foundation that makes its catalog retrievable by agents, betting that buying and checkout eventually happen there too.

Tjaž Silovsek (Astra AI): venture funding is no longer a prerequisite. For many ideas you ship, find distribution, and iterate instead. Astra reached 10 million users and $25M ARR fully bootstrapped, with a small team kept fast by a stable foundation and agents given a lot of autonomy while kept as safe as possible.

DACH Partner Award

Vercel presented its first-ever DACH Partner Award to Valtech, for the exceptional impact and delivery, strategic thinking and team enablement it brought to clients. The presentation also thanked the event's sponsors: OffZero, Storyblok, Cursor, SAP, Accenture Song, Blazity, and JVM.

Ship what's next

Thanks for joining us for Ship 2026 in Berlin. We'll see you in New York City, Sydney, and San Francisco. If you haven't signed up yet, there's still time to get a ticket.

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