How leaders win over their team’s biggest AI skeptics | Superhuman’s Loic Houssier

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 BenFollow Andrew Follow today"s guest(s):Connect with Loïc HoussierLearn more about Superhuman: superhuman.comSuperhuman was acquired by Grammarly: Read about the acquisition Referenced in today"s show:Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWSClaude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP How to Say NoThe Field Guide to AI Slop Support the show: Subscribe to our Substack Leave us a review Subscribe on YouTube Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn Offers: Learn about Continuous Merge with gitStream Get your DORA Metrics free forever