The AI Record
Previously, writing code manually was the bottleneck. I find that with an Amazon, we've found the speed of decision making becomes a new bottleneck. … When it used to take nine to 12 months to build a new product, it didn't matter so much in the overall wash of things if it took two months to make the decision to build the product and then two months to approve the launch. But now, those are the bottlenecks. … Often, I find that frontier engineering teams spend more time making decisions than they do writing code.

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Liguori is describing new organizational bottlenecks Amazon sees when coding is faster.

Talk: From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, AI Engineer (YouTube), August 28, 2026, at 18:45.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools

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Who is speaking

Clare Liguori, Senior Principal Engineer, AWS. Builds the coding assistant she describes and relays pilot results from Amazon teams she did not run herself, so the numbers are second-hand from her; Amazon sells Kiro and AI services, and the talk is promotional of the approach.

Amazon sells AI or agent tooling, so it has a reason to publish flattering numbers about AI. The passage stays in the archive; read it with that in mind.

How this was checked

Not yet checked by an independent second reader. The wording, speaker and date come from the source linked above; treat it as a lead until it is confirmed.

Both whisper passes (full-audio transcription and a separate re-cut clip with 5 seconds of margin) agree on every word quoted. Cuts: two stretches of the talk between these sentences. Normalization: punctuation between passes ('things if' / 'things. If'; 'launch. But now,' / 'launch, but now'; 'Often, I find' / 'Often I find'). 'with an Amazon' is what both passes heard.

How to cite this passage

Clare Liguori (Amazon), “From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team”, AI Engineer (YouTube), 2026-08-28, at 18:45. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqlWNihgdjI Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/amazon-decision-making-new-bottleneck-code-one-to-two-months-2026

More from the same source

90% of these teams used Kiro, among other internal tools that we have, and what they found was it wasn't about the tools, it was about the way that they worked. The teams that achieved step function improvements intentionally changed the way that they worked, and the other simply kind of sprinkled Kiro and some of the other tools that we have on top of their existing way of working.

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Liguori is explaining what separated the Amazon Stores pilot teams that saw a median 4.5x improvement from the rest.

Talk: From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, AI Engineer (YouTube), August 28, 2026, at 7:08.

  • 90% tool usage share, Amazon Stores pilot

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

And sometime last year, we knew, or I say we, but the bedrock team knew that they were going to need to build a new inference data plane. But they had estimated it at 30 people over 18 months. This is a big, big service, and it was … take time to build the new one, migrate customers over, migrate models over, and they decided to take a step back. They took six people and they built it in 76 days with …

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Liguori is describing the Bedrock team (Amazon's model hosting service) and its build of a new inference data plane.

Talk: From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, AI Engineer (YouTube), August 28, 2026, at 2:35.

  • 30 people estimated team size, estimate made last year, as described in 2026
  • 6 people actual team size, built in 76 days

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

And I like to define what we've been calling frontier developers inside of Amazon by three behaviors that I've been seeing. One is hands off coding, frontier developers write maybe … of the code that they produce. The rest is agents. The second is that they interact with their agents infrequently. They'll aim to get their coding assistant to run for up to hours at a time without their intervention. And third is that they minimize idle time. These frontier developers tend to run multiple agents in parallel, … through a backlog of tasks.

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Liguori is defining what Amazon calls frontier developers.

Talk: From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, AI Engineer (YouTube), August 28, 2026, at 1:40.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

And completely anecdotally based on my own experience, I've really only felt maybe 10 to 20% more productive with all of these phases that have come before. But now inside of Amazon, we've been running pilots with different teams across the company, and we've been seeing a median of 4.5x productivity improvement and sometimes more than 10x.

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Liguori is describing how pilots with Amazon teams compare with her own earlier experience of AI coding assistants.

Talk: From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, AI Engineer (YouTube), August 28, 2026, at 1:11.

  • 4.5x productivity gain multiple, Amazon pilots with teams across the company, as described in 2026

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

So another experiment that I want to talk about is an experimental sprint that was done in the Prime Video Organization. They took a 10-day sprint and they … experiment where they put, again, six engineers in a room and they let them go wild with Kiro. They brought down the project delivery time estimate from what was going to be 90 weeks down to 24, based on all of the progress they had made in this 10-day sprint.

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Liguori is describing an experimental sprint in Amazon's Prime Video organization.

Talk: From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, AI Engineer (YouTube), August 28, 2026, at 4:05.

  • 90 weeks delivery estimate before, before the 10-day sprint
  • 24 weeks delivery estimate after, after the 10-day sprint

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

The second one is slowing down to speed up. In almost every team that was interviewed, they reported that their productivity actually went down, as they intentionally adopted a new way of working. That's counterintuitive, right? You have to do intentional engineering work before you're gonna see that hockey stick curve in productivity improvement.

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Liguori is describing the second of five habits that Amazon teams in the pilots and sprints built, according to the interviews she cites.

Talk: From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, AI Engineer (YouTube), August 28, 2026, at 9:39.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

They watched 50 teams that were totally … distribution of early career folks, mid-career senior engineers, and that worked on existing systems. … And they watched them for the better part of last year, and they found something super interesting. They found that there was a big difference in the productivity gains that they saw between half of the teams and the other half. And in this case, they used a productivity metric of deployment velocity to production. … And they saw that for half of the teams, they achieved less than 3X increase.

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Liguori is describing a pilot run by Amazon Stores, which she says covers Amazon.com, its retail websites and its physical stores.

Talk: From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, AI Engineer (YouTube), August 28, 2026, at 5:59.

  • 50 teams teams in pilot, watched for the better part of last year
  • 3x deployment velocity gain half of teams, Amazon Stores pilot

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

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