Every engineering org has tried AI tooling. Very few have gotten it to stick. At Amazon, my team behind the Retail Catalog Pipeline moved past the pilot phase entirely: we built internal tooling that engineers actually reached for every day, and it spread to teams we never pitched it to. No mandate, no rollout plan, just adoption that happened because the tools earned it. In this talk, I'll unpack what we changed about roles, reviews, and ownership to make that possible, the assumptions that slowed us down before we let them go, and a framework you can take home for building workflows that survive contact with a real production system.
This talk has been presented at TechLead Conf London 2026: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.
