Vercel's CEO said choosing one AI lab to partner with is a thing of the past

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said companies are partnering with different AI labs for different functions.

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Vercel's CEO said companies are no longer relying on a single AI lab for all their needs."Last year, there were a lot of people picking one lab partner — saying they would build everything on OpenAI or Anthropic," chief executive Guillermo Rauch said in a Monday interview with TechCrunch.But he said that companies now understand how each part of the AI stack works — from model, harness, data platform, sandbox, and gateway — and "every piece is plug and play.""You can use OpenAI, you can use Anthropic, or you can use Gemini," he added. He said he's seeing a lot of growth in Gemini in particular, because Gemini models have "awesome price/performance characteristics" when scaling up.Chinese models like DeepSeek and Z.ai's GLM-5.2 are also seeing rapid adoption, he said.Rauch added that last year was "all about prototyping" for AI, where everyone built AI agents. Now, companies are "getting into the realities of agents in production, and some of the challenges."Vercel, which is based in San Francisco, is a cloud platform that helps developers host and launch websites and apps.