00:43:50 · Molly O'Shea, Parag Agrawal
[00:43:50] S1: has How been do they know to buy you it alongside the tokens? [00:43:54] S2: They run into problems. Of the common things people run into is people start using a model. That model perhaps bundles itself with a web search. Okay. And they start building an application with that. Now, sometimes it's not good enough and the team realizes that it's the web search component which is causing it, despite the model being great, which is causing it not to be capable enough to solve the problem they're solving. Which is perhaps how we started first working with some of the AI legal, AI finance, AI science kind of customers. The second point at which they really need us is they decide to use multiple models. So we're like, okay, we want to switch across multiple proprietary models on a dime, or we want to start adopting, open weight models. And at that point, having the highest quality web search which works with every model actually enables model independence for you to have flexibility to build your application. So that's the second reason people buy us. The third reason is when people have really scaled use cases and now start optimizing for measuring ROI, optimizing for end to end costs. Because our search is so high signal and token efficient, the models do half the number of searches, use up far fewer tokens, end to end are cheaper, faster. That's the third reason people buy us, which is like, I'm spending too much on tokens. It works. It's useful. Can you help us be more efficient? [00:45:37] S1: So it's not just routing. You also help with token optimization?
00:45:37 · Molly O'Shea, Parag Agrawal
[00:45:37] S1: So it's not just routing. You also help with token optimization? [00:45:42] S2: A lot of categories of knowledge work, where a lot of work happens on the web, we help a lot in token efficiency. [00:45:49] S1: Wow. So when we talked to Gia Vercel, we were talking about the shift of GTM. It was SEO, then it was GEO, and now it's AEO. So like I think [00:46:01] S2: GEO and AU are the same? [00:46:02] S1: A little bit, but not really. Okay. Because the agents now More than chat. Yeah. GEO was like chat. Exactly. So it's like Vercel has optimized itself for the agents coming to its website so agents can read the website and know exactly what products they offer, how they can use it. And so because of that, Vercel is like one of the top uses for building out your products and that kind of coding and all that environment. [00:46:27] S2: No, I think it's interesting you bring that up. Three years ago when we put up our first website up, when we were still kind of... They didn't say anything. We were in stealth. We had a machine version. Until the update, if you go to our website, you will see the human version, and then there's a toggle to transition into the machine version. [00:46:47] S1: Really?
00:46:47 · Molly O'Shea, Parag Agrawal
[00:46:47] S1: Really? [00:46:48] S2: We've had it, as far as I know, were the first website to take on this metaphor because we're building a parallel web for agents. Yeah. And so, we have always carried this metaphor, which now the world is coming around to. It's like a cute thing to do because the truth is the presentation layer almost doesn't matter because we can, we can transform the web. Even if you don't publish your website to be agent friendly, we'll do that for you. Like we can, we can understand what the human version is and how to help it become agent friendly. [00:47:24] S1: Oh, wow. [00:47:26] S2: We don't do AE or GEO, but I think your website will become consumable by agents with us. But I do think like we, for example, even think of our onboarding and our documentation and every part of the developer or customer journey with the primary assumption that it's a human with a coding agent or a developer with a coding agent rather than a developer. And so you'll see a bunch of on our website, you'll see like, put this prompt into your agent and then it'll exactly know how to use parallel to solve whatever problem you're trying to solve. Like one claim, like you just need the human needs to just authorise slash add a credit card slash accept terms and the rest of it, the agent can rip. So really rethinking how you design every experience to be agent first is, I think, pretty fundamental. Vercel, like I know, is very agent built. So people who live that world have an advantage.
00:47:26 · Parag Agrawal, Molly O'Shea
[00:47:26] S2: We don't do AE or GEO, but I think your website will become consumable by agents with us. But I do think like we, for example, even think of our onboarding and our documentation and every part of the developer or customer journey with the primary assumption that it's a human with a coding agent or a developer with a coding agent rather than a developer. And so you'll see a bunch of on our website, you'll see like, put this prompt into your agent and then it'll exactly know how to use parallel to solve whatever problem you're trying to solve. Like one claim, like you just need the human needs to just authorise slash add a credit card slash accept terms and the rest of it, the agent can rip. So really rethinking how you design every experience to be agent first is, I think, pretty fundamental. Vercel, like I know, is very agent built. So people who live that world have an advantage. [00:48:33] S1: We have probably ten or fifteen minutes left, but I'm curious, I mean, you're doing a lot of press, like you're out there, you're used to getting asked a bunch of questions. Like, what are the questions you want to get asked?
00:48:46 · Parag Agrawal
[00:48:46] S2: I spend a fair amount of time thinking about today, proactive agents and always on agents, how that changes the compute world and how that changes the web. So the question I think there to me is, and we've now built a bunch of systems which some people are starting to use around this notion of a proactive web. Or I've been out there saying the web will go from pull to push. So far, as humans, our primary way of searching the web was just us going and searching on Google. For the rare few, you use Google alerts. Frankly, they work. People tried to build like Google Now and a bunch of these things which would send you notifications. Nothing really worked on the web in terms of being proactive. I think with agents and the cost of intelligence going down, it is going to work. And so, now if you imagine an instant or news, implicitly understanding your world and your life, and being able to set up essentially really really high signal, high precision, high recall, alerts on everything that changes on the entire web to know when your agent needs to act on something on your behalf. So, something changes in the world or something might be happening. What do you need to do as a result? Or does that change your plans? Or does that change your actions? How we allocate compute in that world is a problem I'm currently obsessed with Because the web is really large. Right? Like there's a trillion pages out there. A bunch of them are changes changing every day. Most of it is junk. No matter how cheap you make compute, we have not enough compute to compute everything. So now we need to be really smart at prioritizing our compute over everything that is changing on the web. So that more compute can be spent on things which are actually actionable rather than junk changes. The rate of change of the web is also going to dramatically increase. You are starting to see that like people are publishing with agents. You can like the EUSEO businesses like churning out agent generated content on the web, which just means the rate of change on the web is increasing, which means the job of a search engine is to pull the signal from the noise as potentially more noise gets created.
00:51:34 · Molly O'Shea, Parag Agrawal
[00:51:34] S1: How do you think about data centers in space? [00:51:38] S2: I wish I knew more about it. I hope they work. [00:51:43] S1: Have you gone down any of these rabbit holes in this compute? [00:51:47] S2: I haven't. I haven't gone down the data centers in space rabbit hole. I do think we need compute. Yeah. I've gone down a little bit of the how sovereigns will participate in the data center. That is fascinating to me about how that will play out. [00:52:06] S1: Well, one of our partners is Brex and they're all about performance and spending smarter moving faster. I take this topic in the personal way. So I do think performance is a matter of who you spend your time around. Some people say it's your closest five people. Some people think it's like your mentor, people who inspire you. For your career, tremendous career, very interesting. I'm so curious, who is that person or those people for you?