From One To Many: How AI Agents Are Turning Individual Contributors into Team Leads

Whether your team has found a way to implement AI or not, there’s no denying that AI has dramatically shifted productivity expectations. We’re clearly at the beginning of a new era. AI is not just the next page or the next chapter; it’s an entirely new book.

In just a few years, generative AI has gone from a futuristic possibility to a present-day reality. It’s unbelievably powerful already and improving at unprecedented speed. It’s easy to see the explosion of today’s AI technology and get excited about the massive opportunity it presents for smart, agile companies. Thanks to AI, your team might be closer than ever to creating an insurmountable competitive edge.

On the other hand, your competition might be even closer than you. Every day that goes by without your team harnessing the incredible power of AI feels like a lost opportunity. Even if your team doesn’t have an AI plan yet, there’s enormous pressure to move faster and go bigger. Somehow, AI should be solving a range of problems for your organization—talent shortages, data analysis, impersonal customer experiences, economic uncertainty, etc. But how?

Like a lot of revolutionary new technologies, there’s not always a clear place to start using modern generative AI. We know our customers are struggling with this, so we built something that will help: AI Agents.

Agents are a force multiplier. They scale the work your team is doing without requiring additional staff. They instantly analyze your data to find trends and opportunities. They propose and test hypotheses based on their findings. They never stop learning. They help you keep up with an impossibly fast world.

What are AI Agents?

Agents are a lot more than just a new productivity feature. They’re a whole new way to use Amplitude. Essentially, Agents are AI that manage specific tasks for your team.

Previous generations of AI have shown how capable the technology is with generating insights from large amounts of data, but Agents take the next step: acting on those insights. With those abilities, Agents have all the tools to perform a standard build > ship > use > learn > repeat cycle of product improvement. It’s similar to the way your team works now, but at lightspeed. The more you use them, the more they learn and the better they get.

Here’s how it starts: you give your Agent a goal. These are based on product metrics you already track in Amplitude: improving website conversion, boosting feature adoption, making onboarding smoother, etc. Once it has a clear mission, the Agent starts learning. It comes with some best practices built in by the Amplitude team. We’ve worked with thousands of teams over more than a decade, and Agents are our way of giving you digital team members that behave like the best Amplitude power users.

On top of that, the Agent will review all the data from your company’s suite of Amplitude tools (Analytics, Session Replays, Experiments, Guides and Surveys) to learn specifics about your customers and their behavior.

With all that information, the Agent will suggest product updates based on what it thinks will help achieve its goal. When your team approves one of those suggestions, it will build an experiment to validate that hypothesis. That experiment will kick off another round of learning, recommending, and building.

I like to think of Agents as an infinite team of PhD-level interns. They accept their tasks eagerly and they love following rules. They process enormous volumes of data at unparalleled speed. They bring fresh new ideas that your team may have otherwise been blind to. But they won’t take any actions unless you give them approval.

Agents don’t need to sleep, so they stay on 24/7. And they’re infinitely scalable. You can spin up as many as your team needs. They’ll happily work with you or with each other. You don’t even need any technical expertise to work with them, they operate using a simple chat interface.

Agents unlock new cross-team dynamics

Agents work nonstop to optimize your digital experiences. But they also bring a range of second-order effects that structurally evolve the way your individual teams work together across the company. They don’t just make your products work better, they help your team work better.

Consider an Agent that is set up by the product team to monitor feature usage. It can track real-time data and notify anyone at the company when a particular feature sees more or less usage than normal. That information is vital for the product team, but it can also be useful to other lines of business. For example, the marketing team could run promotional campaigns around products that are seeing increases in usage. The outbound sales team could also tailor their outreach to pitch features they know are attractive.

Agents are a collaborative layer of technology that can fit into existing workflows or help create new ones. Here’s an overview of some ways Agents can rewire how your team operates:

• Accelerate insights and decisions: Agents consume enormous volumes of data to generate recommended actions in minutes. Agents can turn real-time data into fully-baked insights and action plans faster than your team can schedule a meeting to discuss options.
• Increase execution velocity: Agents can build campaigns, write documentation, create briefs, QA features, and a lot more. With Agents, your team can launch an A/B test every day instead of every week, dramatically accelerating how quickly you optimize your products and experiences.
• Enabling personalization at scale: From lifecycle communications to dynamic in-product guides, Agents can identify what makes a user unique and adjust their experience in real time. Your team can use Agents to intelligently create user groups and sync messaging across all channels.
• Freeing teams to focus on strategic work: Agents simplify repetitive work (data hygiene, reporting, administrative tasks, etc.) on all teams, so employees can spend more time on strategy, creativity, and building relationships.

The overall impact of Agents is to radically expand what your existing employees can do without requiring new headcount. Modern organizations can choose to restructure and grow in a way that turns every employee into a team leader. The teams they lead could be pods of 5-10 Agents, each focused on one specific part of the business.

This type of agentic team isn’t some futuristic model to strive for decades from now. It’s already possible today.

How to effectively add Agents to your team

Like all AI technologies, the right approach to using Agents isn’t to recklessly create a ton of them and see what they do. Be thoughtful. Your Agent is a specialist that does one job extremely well. You need to make sure you’re lined up in the right direction before you hit the accelerator.

Here’s how you can make sure you have success with Agents:

1. Identify a bottleneck: The ultimate job of the Agent is to take repeatable work off of an employee’s plate. Find common, high-friction tasks that team members are spending a lot of time on. Maybe someone is spending time monitoring real-time data to alert the team of certain events. Maybe someone is frequently creating reports that could be automated. Your team might already have a list of inefficient tasks that they’d love to assign to an Agent.
2. Deploy a starter Agent: Try your Agents in a limited environment. When you start, keep it to one Agent per team. Give everyone on the team clear visibility into the expectations for the Agent so they are comfortable working with it and can track its progress.
3. Double (or triple) down on what works: Once you’re comfortable with how your starter Agents fit into your team, look for a similar job a second Agent could do. They are hungry for information, so train new Agents on the things that the old ones have learned.

Agents are infinitely scalable. As long as you keep finding the right work for them to do, they will keep providing value to your team. They are the ultimate shortcut to the resource limitations that have historically limited product, marketing, and growth teams.

We’re entering a new era. One where your team doesn’t need to hire to expand. One where your most productive employees can be AI. The organizations that win in this era won’t be the ones who have to wait for new hires to scale their work. They’ll be the ones that scale with intelligence, turning their employees into AI team leaders.