3x Output, Same Headcount: What It Took to Make AI Adoption Stick

Last year we discussed how a single AI Week moved 200+ builders to be 40% faster. This is the part that matters more: what happened in the 51 weeks after. The spike faded, the skeptics got louder, the token bills arrived, and the agents we built failed in ways we could not explain. A year later, Amplitude ships three times the pull requests with the same headcount, cycle time is under an hour, and our second AI Week pulled in the entire company, from sales reps opening a terminal for the first time to the CEO shipping his own demo. None of it came from the tools. It came from leaders willing to build live in front of 600 people and fail, from treating AI spend as leverage instead of cost, and from accepting that adoption is a treadmill, not a project. This is the sequel: what stuck, what didn't, and what it takes from the person at the top.