You’ve heard of spirit week, but have you heard of AI week, its nerdier, lesser known cousin?
In June, the product development team at digital analytics platform company Amplitude spent a week at the company’s San Francisco office, taking a break from their usual workload to participate in the company’s first ever AI week.
Why AI week? Amplitude Chief Engineering Officer Wade Chambers told IT Brew that the purpose of Amplitude’s AI week was to find a way to get employees to the same level of “fluency” when using AI tools in a short amount of time. A recent GoTo report surveyed 2,500 employees and IT leaders and found that 86% of employees feel they aren’t using AI tools to their full potential.
“We have a lot of the right core talent with deep understanding of models and the tech tools and technology that you can use around,” Chambers said. “What we wanted to do was make sure that that was now spread through the entire organization.”
Chambers said the company took inspiration from the intensive bootcamp Meta made available to its employees when the tech giant started homing in on its mobile-first strategy. He added that it was important for Amplitude to find a balance between training employees and challenging them.
“If there’s too much challenge and not enough training, everybody gets anxious,” Chambers said. “And if there’s too much training and not enough challenge, everybody gets bored.”
Weekly agenda. The beginning of Amplitude’s AI week involved training on “vibe coding” tools like Cursor and Bolt, guest speakers from AI-savvy companies, and discussions around the responsible way to use AI tools.
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From day three onward, employees were given time to practice using the tools in a safe environment.
“If you need 20 hours of practice to become good at something, we wanted to make sure that we shoved those 20 hours into a single contiguous block,” Chambers said.
Chambers said some employees focused on finding ways AI could help advance some of the things they were currently working on, while others were free to use the days as “greenfield exploration.”
On each of the three days, employees participated in a show, tell, and ask, where teams presented their discoveries and failures. By the end of the week, Chambers said employees had built “profound” and “meaningful things.”
“[On] one team, the leader came to me afterwards and is like, ‘Yeah, we had something lined up in Q3 where we thought that was going to take three months to do based on sort of historical norms. I think that’s now going to happen in less than three weeks,’” Chambers said.
The debrief. Less than a month after Amplitude’s company AI week, Chambers said there are already a few ideas from AI week that are making its way into product.
“I can think of easily three and maybe four that probably within the next week or so will make their way into working product,” Chambers said. “We’ll probably roll it out to a very small set of users and make sure that it’s having its intended effect.”