Forget top-down mandates. How do you foster organic AI adoption on a skeptical, high-performing engineering team? Loic Houssier, Head of Engineering at Superhuman, joins us to share how he did just that. He explains his strategy for overcoming cynicism, which involved leveraging a highly respected internal champion, the Chief Architect, to re-evaluate the tools and prove their potential was no longer just buzz. Discover his team's biggest, unexpected productivity gains: dramatically faster ramp-up times on new codebases and the rapid creation of valuable internal tools, rather than just raw code generation speed. Loic details Superhuman's pragmatic, high-trust approach to measurement, blending qualitative feedback with simple signals like PR labels. He explains how they fostered this adoption with a bottom-up "AI Guild," empowering engineers of all seniorities without a heavy-handed mandate. He also reveals a stunning real-world example where AI turned a potentially days-long compliance task into a 90-minute win. This episode is a practical playbook for building genuine, bottom-up AI adoption. Get the guide: AI productivity guide for engineering leaders Follow the hosts: Follow Ben Follow Andrew Follow today's guest(s): Connect with Loïc Houssier Learn more about Superhuman: superhuman.com Superhuman was acquired by Grammarly: Read about the acquisition Referenced in today's show: Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWS Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP How to Say No The Field Guide to AI Slop OFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.
