Vercel AI Updates: October 17, 2026

1. Vercel Shop Makes Shopify Storefronts Shoppable by Agents Over MCP

Vercel. Vercel Shop, an open source Next.js storefront template for Shopify, is now generally available. It is built on Shopify’s Hydrogen SDK, which Vercel and Shopify rebuilt to work across JavaScript frameworks and which is also now GA. Each product URL serves a visual page to human shoppers and structured data (price, availability, options) to agents. The storefront also exposes the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), co-developed by Shopify, over MCP on the merchant’s own domain, so agents can search the catalog, build a cart, and get a checkout link without scraping pages. The template includes a shopping assistant powered by eve that shares its cart with the regular browsing UI, plus bundled agent skills that help coding agents with setup and customization. You can start with pnpm create next-app@latest my-store --example https://github.com/vercel/shop. Source

2. Reflection AI’s Beam Is Free on AI Gateway for a Limited Time, Revealing Cat Jam’s Identity

Vercel. AI Gateway now serves Reflection AI’s Beam, an Apache 2.0 open-weight reasoning model for coding and agentic tasks. It has a 1M-token context window, tool calling, structured outputs, and adjustable reasoning effort. Vercel confirmed that Beam is the model it offered earlier in stealth as stealth/cat-jam. There are two model IDs: reflection/beam will switch to paid pricing with no downtime when the free launch period ends, while reflection/beam-free will stop serving at that point. Vercel has not announced an end date or rate limits for the free period. Source

3. Perplexity’s Decider V1.2 Classification Models Come to AI Gateway

Vercel. AI Gateway added Perplexity’s Decider V1.2 27B (perplexity/pplx-decider-v1.2), meant for nuanced judgments against detailed rubrics, and Decider Flash V1.2 4B (perplexity/pplx-decider-flash-v1.2), meant for high-volume labeling, filtering, and routing. Both are multimodal decision models that score text, structured records, and images. Instead of free-form text, they return probabilities for typed questions: Boolean, Choice, and Score against an ordered rubric. Several questions can share one input in a single request, which suits guardrail and routing layers in agent pipelines. Pricing is Perplexity’s own rate with no Gateway markup, including for BYOK. Source