Descriptions:
Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel with over 25 years of software engineering experience spanning Google and Vercel, opens the inaugural European AI Engineer conference with a keynote on what he calls “the new application layer.” His central thesis is that AI agents make economically viable a large category of software that was previously too expensive to build—filling the gap between what should be automated and what traditionally could be.
Ubl outlines several practical agent archetypes gaining traction: always-on service agents replacing 9-to-5 human roles with 24/7 automation; compressed research agents that handle the information-gathering phase of business decisions while leaving final judgment to humans; and information-surfacing systems that make institutional knowledge accessible on demand. He shares concrete Vercel examples: an agent that classifies inbound sales contacts (routing roughly 75% to support rather than the sales team) and another that performs initial triage on abuse reports, saving human reviewers roughly 15 minutes per incident.
On the infrastructure side, Ubl mentions two personal projects—chat SDK, a connector linking AI agents to messaging platforms like Slack, Telegram, and WhatsApp, and just-bash, a TypeScript bash interpreter with near-nanosecond startup time designed for sandboxed agent execution. His broader argument is that software engineering is expanding rather than contracting, as agent economics unlock entirely new categories of automation that were never financially justifiable with traditional development methods.
📺 Source: AI Engineer · Published April 20, 2026
🏷️ Format: Keynote Launch
