A Single Field Engineering Organization
Vercel has appointed David Totten as VP of Global Field Engineering. Totten, who spent two decades building and scaling technical teams, will lead a unified organization covering Sales Engineering, Developer Success, Professional Services, and Customer Support Engineering. The consolidation is intended to eliminate the traditional handoff gaps that occur as customers move from evaluation to onboarding to growth.
By grouping customer-facing technical teams under one leader, Vercel aims to provide a consistent relationship from first evaluation through long-term scaling. The company frames this as extending its product philosophy to go-to-market: treating customer interactions with the same care as the developer experience on its platform.
From Databricks to Vercel
Totten joins from Databricks, where he helped shape customer engagement during a period of rapid AI-driven growth, building repeatable go-to-market and customer success strategies. Prior to that, he spent nearly two decades at a Fortune 5 company as a field CTO, guiding thousands of organizations through cloud adoption and technology modernization.
"What drew me to Vercel was seeing a company powering the forefront of AI, powered by AI itself."
David Totten
Totten sees Vercel's dual role as both an enabler and a user of AI as a core differentiator. "Because Vercel isn't simply enabling developers to build AI applications. We're using AI to deliver better customer outcomes at scale," he said. That means the field engineering team will rely on internally proven practices rather than untested theories when helping customers deploy AI.
AI as an Internal Proof Point
Vercel reports that its own support agent handles over 75% of customer cases despite their technical complexity, freeing human staff for higher-impact work. Internally built agents have also reallocated 90% of SDR headcount while maintaining conversion rates, and average touches per lead fell from 8 to 4. The company is additionally investing in Forward Deployed Engineering to help enterprises integrate AI into both internal operations and customer-facing products.
- The support agent manages more than 75% of customer cases, allowing the team to focus on high-impact engagements.
- Agents reallocated 90% of SDR headcount while keeping conversion rates stable; average touches per lead dropped from 8 to 4.
- Forward Deployed Engineering is being built out to support enterprise AI integration.
"Using the power and scale of AI to create actionable customer experiences is how every business aspires to lead."
David Totten
According to Totten, platforms and data access are becoming commoditized. The emerging competitive edge lies in delivering real-time insights and opportunities to customers directly, in a frictionless manner. As AI becomes embedded in applications and agentic experiences normalize, technical enablement will increasingly function as a competitive advantage rather than a support function.
