Here at Amplify we are not fans of jargon. We do not care for generic business terms like innovation. We do not enjoy double clicking, synergies, taking things offline, circling back, or even the conjoined triangles of success. We back developers, researchers, and scientists; people who say what they mean.

However there is a problem. The environments where these terms are most at home – the world’s enterprises and large companies – are having a very bad time adopting AI. Models have dramatically changed my work, they may have dramatically changed your work, but they haven’t quite dramatically changed the work of teams at the typical enterprise. And so these enterprises often appoint leaders to “rollout” AI to the organization, ensuring that each employee has the tools they need. The job title that many of these leaders carry is none other than the final boss of jargon: “AI Transformation.”

Behind these seemingly nebulous terms (which are actually quite accurate and descriptive when you think about it) are teams that are smart, that are ambitious, but that are blocked by larger company problems like security, integrations, and an inability to properly share their work with each other. You have individual power users who are cooking, but what they build often just stays on their laptop instead of leveling up the whole team.

And so despite having access to frontier models, the productivity (and creativity!) gains aren’t fully there. The frontier doesn’t matter if you can’t use it.

Which brings us to Jordan Lewis and Lakshmi Kannan. They were working together at Cockroach Labs running large teams and facing problems not so dissimilar from the above. They built an internal tool called Mica to solve some of them. Unexpected by both them and their new users, 85% of the entire company started using Mica within 1 week. This 85% of the entire company built thousands of apps over the next few months, many of which now power foundational bits of how Cockroach runs. This is what we mean when we say AI transformation.

So how do you turn your company from a place where individuals use AI to a place where the organization runs on AI? Broadly, three things:

  1. You need to make sharing AI apps, skills, and workflows a first-level primitive. Every organization will have outlier power users; you must make sure that their work becomes the new floor for the team.
  2. You need to completely unblock your users from any authn or authz problems. This means pre-built integrations with all of their tools, run with each person's own permissions or Service Accounts, and reviewable by admins.
  3. You need to make it laughably easy to build production-ready apps and jobs without opening an engineering ticket. Databases, RBAC, etc. must be automatic so that vibe coding creates vibe real artifacts.

The holy grail for these enterprises, and what we mean when we talk about being AI-native, is that you begin to develop a self-improving system. It starts with your power users finding personal wins, building a workflow or skill or app with AI that saves them a lot of time. You must make this as easy as possible for them to do, removing roadblocks like deployment and integrations.

Then these personal wins – be it an app, skill, job, or anything else – get packaged and published to the team. Now anyone who’s got a similar job can benefit from the productivity boost this win bestowed upon its creator. Even people in other jobs might take inspiration and fork the artifact. You have gone from AI dispersed to AI-first because you have created a collective, cooperative, self-improving system. Then, ideally, you get promoted.

We are really excited that Mica’s rollout at Cockroach went so well, because it encouraged Jordan and Lakshmi to leave and start something new. That something is Tiles, and it is exactly how enterprises in the future are going to create this system. Tiles combines first-class sharing, a complete suite for authentication and authorization that enterprises can trust, and a deployment platform that enables anyone to get an app up and running on real infra quickly.

They’re announcing early access today, for which you can sign up on their unusually suave website. We’re excited to be along for this journey with them and lead their pre-seed, preparing for future collaboration and potential synergistic business opportu…oops, there I go again.