---
title: "From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-06-29"
time: "2:50pm-3:10pm"
track: "AI-Native Enterprises"
room: "Leadership 1"
speakers: ["Clare Liguori"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "AI-Native Enterprises"
scheduleRoom: "Leadership 1"
scheduleLabels: ["AI-Native Enterprises", "Leadership 1", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 2:50pm-3:10pm
- Track/room: AI-Native Enterprises · Leadership 1
- Speaker(s): Clare Liguori
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: AI-Native Enterprises
- Room: Leadership 1
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
When features that took two weeks now ship in an afternoon, the bottleneck shifts from writing code to making decisions. Frontier teams have discovered this firsthand, achieving 3-10x productivity gains by fundamentally rethinking how developers work with AI agents. This talk covers the practices that separate frontier teams from those who merely "sprinkle" AI on their existing workflows: running agents asynchronously for hours, investing in comprehensive agent steering files, enabling local integration testing for agent self-correction, and automating everything from coding to operations to documentation. You'll learn how teams at Amazon slowed down to speed up, the temporary productivity dips they accepted, and the organizational changes required to sustain this velocity.

## Media Evidence
No related AI Engineer channel video found yet.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
No official session recording transcript was found by exact title match on the AI Engineer YouTube channel during this run.

## People
- [[clare-liguori]]

## Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 2:50pm-3:10pm - Track/room: AI-Native Enterprises · Leadership 1 - Speaker(s): Clare Liguori - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: AI-Native Enterprises - Room: Leadership 1 - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description When features that took two weeks now ship in an afternoon, the bottleneck shifts from writing code to making decisions. Frontier teams have discovered this firsthand, achieving 3-10x productivity gains by fundamentally rethinking how developers work with AI agents. This talk covers the practices that separate frontier teams from those who merely "sprinkle" AI on their existing workflows: running agents asynchronously for hours, investing in comprehensive agent steering files, enabling local integration testing for agent self-correction, and automating everything from coding to operations to documentation. You'll learn how teams at Amazon slowed down to speed up, the temporary productivity dips they accepted, and the organizational changes required to sustain this velocity.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[clare-liguori|Clare Liguori]] — Senior Principal Engineer at [[amazon-web-services|Amazon Web Services]].

### Topics Covered
- [[agentic-search]]
- [[coding-agents]]

### Derived Links And Source Material

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.