Have Vera join any call now, and choose who walks in

You know the problem even if you have never named it. A vendor call is booked, the calendar invite arrives, and the person best placed to counter the numbers is not in the room. Maybe they are on another call. Maybe the meeting was set by someone who did not think to loop them in. So the call runs, the vendor anchors high, and the market context that would have moved the price sits in a report nobody opened. The gap between having the analysis and having it in the room at the moment it matters is where most negotiating leverage quietly leaks out. Today we are closing part of that gap.

What we shipped

The call room's stage now carries a third lane. Alongside the internal line and Send Vera in, you can paste a link to a meeting that is running right now, a Zoom, Teams, Meet or Webex link, choose who walks in, and press Join the call now. Vera goes to the door of that meeting and asks to be let in. She does not force her way past your host. The moment the host admits her, she introduces herself the way a person would, says why she is there, and settles in. The lane on the stage tells you where she stands, waiting at the door, admitted, in the room, shows you the last lines she heard, and keeps two controls within reach at all times: Mute her, and Walk her out. This builds directly on the work we described in the call copilot, except she is no longer only in your ear. She can be at the table.

Who walks in is one menu

The choice of who attends is a single menu on the stage, and it is honoured the same way everywhere, on the internal line, in the join lane, and through Send Vera in. You get three kinds of attendee. First, Vera herself, the buyer-side analyst you already work with. Second, any specialist from the bench, drawn from the six specialist agents, so a contract-heavy call can bring the clause and coverage expertise and a pricing call can bring the benchmarking depth. Third, and new, Vera Demo, a persona built for someone who has not bought the platform yet. She says hello like a person, asks what they are working on and what matters to them, listens before she talks, is dry in small doses, and shows what the platform actually does for their specific situation. She is plain about one thing in particular. It augments the people who do this work rather than replacing them. If you are weighing how a small function covers a large workload, that framing sits next to the one-person procurement desk.

How it fits the workflow

Nothing about your existing calendar or meeting tooling changes. You do not migrate anything or ask the vendor to install a plugin. The meeting stays wherever it already lives. You paste the link and Vera presents herself at the door like any other guest, subject to your host's admission. That matters for control. She cannot appear uninvited, and you can Walk her out with one click if the conversation turns to something you would rather she not attend. When the call ends, the work follows the same path we described in the call room memo, so what was said becomes something you can act on rather than something you half remember. Training workspaces meet Vera as stop three of the tour, which means new users see the join lane in context before they run it against a real vendor.

Honest limits

Be clear-eyed about what this is and is not. Vera cannot enter a meeting your host will not admit, by design, so if the room is locked or the organiser declines her at the door, she waits or leaves. She works from the same source material as the rest of the platform, a benchmark library covering 1,483 vendors, calibrated to documented market evidence, and where a deal is genuinely novel or falls outside the cohorts we can match against, she will say the evidence is thin rather than fabricate a figure. She is dry in small doses, not a substitute for your judgement in the room, and she does not negotiate on your behalf or make commitments. She surfaces the number and the context. The decision, the tone, and the walk-away are yours. Voice recognition on a noisy line is imperfect, so the last lines she heard on the stage are there precisely so you can catch and correct a misread before it becomes a mistaken figure. And Vera Demo is a demonstration persona, honest about being one, not a signed reference or a promise about your specific contract. If you want to see the join lane against a real meeting, or run Vera Demo for a colleague who has not bought yet, open the call room and paste a live link. For the wider case on covering more ground with fewer people, the downturn playbook is the companion read.