The analytics platform, best known for helping brands understand how people actually use their digital products, is relaunching in January as an “AI-native” system. CMO Tifenn Dano Kwan tells The Drum why marketing now starts where the product begins.
Tifenn Dano Kwan
Amplitude didn’t mean to start a fight when it launched its new AI Visibility tool in November - but it accidentally kicked a hornet’s nest anyway.
The premise was simple enough: a free tool that shows brands how often they appear inside large language models. A sort of SEO-for-AI moment. But once people realised they’d been paying eye-watering sums for similar products, the reaction was instant. “It went completely viral,” says Amplitude CMO Tifenn Dano Kwan. “A lot of the industry started to realise: why would I need to spend so much money if I can have it for free?”
It’s the sort of chaos you only trigger when you put your finger on a pressure point. And for Amplitude, that pressure point is going to get even bigger in January, when the company relaunches itself as the “AI analytics platform” baking AI into the product rather than using it as a bolt-on or a new billing tier.
Everybody else keeps adding AI as a premium feature. Amplitude is doing the opposite: flattening the paywall and hard-wiring AI straight into the experience.
“We redesigned the platform to become more AI native,” she says. “If we build AI capabilities, they will be integral to the experience. They pay for the experience. They don’t pay for the AI capability.”
In an industry hooked on subscription surcharges and per-seat pricing, it’s practically heresy. But it also makes a bigger point about where marketing itself is going.
A lot of CMOs will tell you they’re “data-driven.” Dano Kwan actually means it. Her view of the job is simple: marketing has moved inside the product, and most marketers haven’t caught up.
“The biggest change is the convergence of product and marketing,” she says. “When there is an online experience – that’s what we call a product. It requires product development. It’s not just a website.”
The marketer of the future, she argues, isn’t the person who buys media or runs a brand campaign. The marketer of the future is the person who understands how the product actually works - who comes in, what they do, where they drop off, what they click, what annoys them, and what brings them back.
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“What marketers of the future need to deeply understand is the lifecycle of the product,” she says. “You need to create a moat so that you get them in the product, you keep them in the product, and keep them coming back.”
This is not the language of traditional marketing departments. It’s the language of product managers. Which is the point.
When she describes Amplitude’s analytics platform - the behavioural graph, the insight layer, the action layer - she talks like someone who expects a modern marketing team to operate it the way a chef operates a kitchen. Not optional. Essential.
And she practices what she preaches. Every launch, including AI Visibility, comes with a forensic day-one and week-one recap: page views, report submissions, sign-ups, social traffic. “I use all of Amplitude’s systems to capture the data,” she says. “It’s all charted in Amplitude.”
Marketing grounded in usage patterns, not wishful positioning, in other words.
Companies are quietly realizing something awkward: they may have spent years fighting for Google rankings… only to discover that the next big discovery engine isn’t search at all. It’s LLMs - the bots people ask when they want to know where to eat, what to buy or which service to trust.
Suddenly, the question isn’t “How do I rank?”
It’s “Does the AI even know I exist?”
AI Visibility answers that - for free. Which is why it got 14,000 report submissions within days of launch.
And it explains the subtext of the January relaunch. Amplitude is betting that AI won’t be a special feature. It won’t be a paid upgrade. It’ll just be part of how analytics works, the same way spellcheck stopped being an add-on and became part of word processors.
Their stance is blunt: don’t charge people for your experiments. Let them learn with you. And then monetise the outcomes that actually matter.
“We want to remove the barrier of entry,” she says. “We don’t want our customers to pay for what we believe should be integral to the platform. They pay for the experience. They don’t pay for the AI capability.”
Internally, people joked about calling it “Amplitude 2.0.” That idea died fast.
“Everybody said, ‘Should we call it Amplitude 2.0?’” she says. “We decided to just call it the AI analytics platform. Yes, it’s a relaunch - but it’s clean.”
Coming in January:
• AI agents woven directly into workflows
• A global chat experience that behaves like ChatGPT inside Amplitude
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• The ability to query Amplitude from Slack, Anthropic or ChatGPT
• A new pricing model that doesn’t punish AI adopters with “innovation taxes”
• Assistants/copilots to help teams navigate data, dashboards and acquisition flows
It’s a reset - not in branding, but in philosophy. And the philosophy is that AI should be the plumbing, not some added extra.
“We’ve decided to make it part of everything we offer moving forward,” she says. “There’s no premium. There’s just a new way of embracing our platform.”
If you strip away the jargon and the noise, the argument Dano Kwan is making is deceptively simple:
She puts it plainly: “Everything around analytics, digital and product marketing is going to become a key differentiator.”
When Amplitude launched its free AI Visibility tool, we did what any self-respecting media brand would do: we immediately typed “The Drum” into the box to see whether the robots are talking about us behind our backs.
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The tool works like this:
You enter a brand, category or competitor. Amplitude then runs that query through hundreds of LLM prompts across platforms — think ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other systems — and reports back:
It is, effectively, SEO for the AI era – except instead of fighting Google’s algorithm, you’re seeing how the new generation of AI engines perceive your brand.
So, what happened when we ran The Drum?
Among major industry titles, The Drum appeared in 12% of the AI responses – placing us right behind Adweek (14%) and Digiday (13%), and comfortably ahead of WARC, LinkedIn, YouTube, Marketing Brew, AdExchanger and the rest of the pack.
No victory laps. But… not bad.
The “Top Topics by Visibility” panel shows what kind of conversations we appear in.
Here’s our spread:
In plain English: the AIs think of The Drum as a source on emerging marketing tech, strategic thinking and industry-wide change. Which isn’t a bad reading of the editorial agenda.