Amplitude Inc. is preparing a major shift in its product strategy that will put artificial intelligence at the center of how companies understand customer intent and research behavior.

n a recent interview with SiliconANGLE, Chief Executive Spenser Skates (pictured) said the market is entering a phase in which analytics tools must retool to be “AI-native,” transforming how product teams query data and uncover insights. Though coding tools have quickly adapted the speed and productivity benefits of AI-assisted development, Skates said, the downstream process of understanding how customers use products has changed little.

Skates called analytics “a perfect problem for AI,” because analysts must frequently query complex datasets, iterate on hypotheses and translate business questions into structured queries. The company believes agents can perform these iterative loops automatically, providing faster answers to common product questions such as the reasons behind conversion drop-offs or trends in customer retention.

The company plans to accelerate that shift through a series of new products designed to automate analysis, recognize intent and track how customers discover and evaluate software in an AI-first search ecosystem.

Amplitude is rolling out three products in quick succession aimed at offloading the manual steps analysts currently perform.

MCP Server exposes behavioral data to any AI tool or workflow using the Model Context Protocol. AI Visibility is a new analytics feature that helps companies understand how their brand, product or category appears inside AI-generated answers from tools like OpenAI LLC’s ChatGPT and Google LLC’s Gemini.

AI Feedback, introduced last week, works across the company’s analytics, session replay, and survey tools to summarize customer input and understand what matters most to customers.

Additional releases are planned over the next few months, including a global chat interface for analytics and deeper integrations with the existing Amplitude Assistant tool. “When you look back a year from now … clearly analytics is going to be used incredibly differently,” Skates said.

Modeling customer intent

A major theme in Amplitude’s roadmap is the shift from traditional website interactions to AI-mediated discovery. With tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and emerging AI browsers increasingly supplying direct answers, customers now often bypass websites entirely because AI interfaces satisfy their information needs.

AI Visibility is aimed at that behavioral change. It analyzes mentions of a company in large language model responses. The product identifies where a brand ranks in responses to prompts such as “alternatives to Google Analytics for product usage,” enabling companies to benchmark their visibility among AI-generated summaries.

Skates said Amplitude intends to expand the tool to track how Gemini and other search engines present AI overviews, showing whether a product appears in summaries and what factors influence rankings. He said this capability reflects a broader transition in buying behavior: Customers increasingly gather information from summaries rather than clicking through to search results.

For companies whose value is tied to direct traffic, such as community sites, this shift can be painful, Skates said. “If you’re a Stack Overflow or a Quora, the answer is just going to be there,” he said, noting that some customers are already experiencing reduced engagement as a result of AI-generated answers. By contrast, business-to-business research is less likely to be affected because users want to access original content.

Search revolution

The emergence of AI-first search also affects how marketers should structure their content, Skates said. FAQ-style pages are becoming increasingly valuable because language models often rely on clearly defined question-and-answer structures. “It you have a lot of FAQ pages, then that will really help” with LLM performance, he said.

As LLMs diversify through AI browsers and non-Google search interfaces, Amplitude expects more fragmentation in how buyers find information. Skates characterized this as positive for Amplitude because every new interface creates new behaviors and a greater need for behavioral analytics.

Skates asserted that Amplitude’s dataset focused on digital product behavior gives it an edge over general-purpose data warehouse providers that are attempting to layer generative AI on top of broad data types. Models struggle when asked to derive insights from arbitrary datasets without task constraints, he said, but they perform well when given specific analytical tasks in manageable chunks.

“Writing SQL is not the hard part,” he said. General-purpose data analytics platforms “don’t know how to make a conversion funnel or segment their user base by behavior.”

The next year, he said, will show how AI-native tools reshape the entire process of understanding customer intent and behavior.

Photo: Amplitude