From AI Skeptic to All-In
In a recent YC Light Cone podcast, Amplitude CEO Spencer Skates described a rapid shift many established companies are now facing: moving from AI skepticism to making AI central to their strategy.
Amplitude didn’t pivot because of hype or pressure from the market. The change came when internal teams experienced real productivity gains from AI tools in engineering. Once the benefits were undeniable, leadership realised the same disruption was coming for analytics — their core business.
1. AI Adoption Starts With Usefulness, Not Belief
Many organisations initially dismiss AI as unreliable or overhyped. What changes minds isn’t vision decks or mandates, but practical results. When employees start working faster and differently, resistance fades quickly.
Lesson: AI adoption is driven bottom-up through value, not top-down enthusiasm.
2. Why Customer-Led Product Strategy Breaks in the AI Era
Traditional B2B playbooks rely on asking customers what they want. That approach works for incremental improvements, but fails with AI.
Customers can’t ask for capabilities they don’t yet understand. They’ll request better versions of existing tools rather than fundamentally new ways of working.
Lesson: In AI, companies must lead with capability insight, not customer wish-lists.
3. Culture Change Requires Visible Commitment
To shift an 800-person organisation, Amplitude paused normal operations to run an internal AI sprint, pushed leaders to use AI tools publicly, and reorganised teams around AI-native work.
Some leaders adapted. Others didn’t.
Lesson: Serious transformation requires clear signals, visible leadership buy-in, and difficult organisational decisions.
4. Leadership Must Shift From “Doing” to “Enabling”
Skates also reflected on the difference between founder mode and CEO mode. At scale, leaders can’t personally solve every problem. AI transformations demand delegation, structure, and trust in teams.
Lesson: AI strategy fails when leadership tries to stay hands-on everywhere.
The Result
Amplitude has since launched AI-driven tools that allow users to interact with analytics conversationally and track brand visibility in large language models.
Rather than defending its legacy model, the company chose to redefine its category.
The Bigger Takeaway
Most businesses won’t be disrupted by AI overnight. They’ll be disrupted by delaying decisive action once the evidence is clear.
The winners won’t be the most enthusiastic — but the ones willing to rethink how products are built, how teams work, and how leadership shows up.
About Amplitude
Amplitude is a digital analytics platform that helps businesses understand how users interact with their websites, apps, and digital products. It enables product, marketing, and growth teams to analyse user behaviour, improve retention and conversion, and make data-driven decisions. More recently, Amplitude has begun integrating AI to make analytics more accessible through automated insights and conversational analysis.