Theo Nakamura

Theo Nakamura is Product Director at Vercel, where he leads the product team responsible for Vercel's AI-powered developer experience features. He has spent four years at Vercel working on the intersection of developer tools and AI — an intersection that, in his view, has been handled badly by almost everyone including Vercel at various points.

His work focuses on what he calls AI-native product design — building products where the AI capability is so integrated into the workflow that users stop thinking of it as AI and start thinking of it as the product working correctly. The distinction sounds subtle but drives every design and engineering decision his team makes.

At BuildWithAI Summit, Theo shares Vercel's framework for designing AI-native experiences — the principles, the tradeoffs, and the specific design patterns that separate products where AI feels seamless from products where it feels like a feature someone bolted on. A talk for product designers and PMs who want their AI features to feel like the product, not an addition to it.