Front-end application development platform startup Vercel Inc. today announced that it’s launching an artificial intelligence accelerator program designed for AI builders to scale up their projects, along with a new family of AI products.

The new Vercel AI Accelerator is aimed at bringing early-stage startups on board to build and scale their AI solutions by providing them with the resources that they need. They will come in the form of capital, application programming interface credits at the top AI firms, coaching and access to a broad developer community.

San Francisco-based Vercel provides a popular cloud-based platform that allows developers to rapidly create, deploy and host websites. Its solution also allows developers to easily perform related development tasks such as troubleshooting performance issues. With the platform, developers no longer need to worry about building both back-end and front-end and can offload back-end tasks to APIs and infrastructure.

“In a rapidly evolving technological landscape, where AI has emerged as the dominant force, developers must have the ability to seamlessly deploy AI applications and tools whenever inspiration strikes,” Lee Robinson, vice president of developer experience at Vercel, told SiliconANGLE.

Over the course of six weeks, 40 industry-leading projects and startups will be given access to specialized coaching with leading AI experts who will share their skills and provide guidance through the new accelerator program. This will take place during fireside chats and office hours. Vercel also has its own Developer Experience Team that will act to coach individual builders and startups.

In addition, many of AI’s leading companies have come on board bringing over $850,000 in API credits split between the participants in the accelerator program. Included in the program are big names such as Anthropic, OpenAI LP, Stability AI Ltd., Cohere Inc., and Eleven Labs Inc. Builders will also be awarded credits to Vercel’s Frontend Cloud platform as well.

As it’s important for builders and startups to get access to investors in the competitive AI landscape, Vercel’s accelerator program is also offering dedicated time with an investor who will provide office hours and a fireside chat for feedback and guidance.

Applicants are welcome to visit the Vercel Accelerator website for their chance to join the program today.

Alongside the accelerator program, Vercel is also launching a line of new products that will allow developers to build and deploy AI applications. These include an interactive playground for testing and experimenting, a software development kit and a chatbot.

“Front-end developers face the challenge of building and shipping products within tight timelines, often without enough resources to invest in costly AI development,” said Robinson. “Rapid product delivery is crucial, and that’s where an agile development environment becomes essential. Developers need a platform that enables them to move quickly, delivering products to end users when it matters most.”

Robinson said the company saw an 800% surge in AI businesses using the Frontend Cloud in the first four months of 2023. “We recognized the need to provide developers with the necessary resources to deploy dynamic AI experiences,” he said.

Using the newly launched Vercel AI Playground, developers can test and experiment with AI technologies collaboratively without needing to set up complex local environments or deploy AI models on their own infrastructure. That means that developers can access the playground and begin experimenting immediately.

It’s also designed with collaboration in mind, allowing developers to learn from each other’s experiments and thus share design insights with one another. To that end, developers can better accelerate their own learning processes together.

The Vercel AI SDK provides developers with an open-source library designed to help developers quickly build front-end conversational streaming text and chat user interfaces in JavaScript. With it, developers can quickly integrate chatbots and prompt engines into their web applications and scale them.

The company is also offering a chatbot starter template to simplify developing and deploying AI chatbot solutions. Already many large enterprises are building chatbots directly into their applications, but building these AI models in-house is a complex and arduous endeavor.

By using Vercel’s solution, companies will be able to develop their own chatbot while maintaining control over their data and ensuring a consistent user experience with front-end development tools and infrastructure for deploying chatbot solutions at large scale.

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