Amplitude (NASDAQ:AMPL) is positioning itself as an “infrastructure layer” for understanding and improving digital customer interactions, according to CFO Andrew Casey, speaking at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference. Casey said the company is becoming more relevant across marketing and customer experience use cases, alongside its roots in product analytics, as organizations seek to analyze and optimize how customers engage through web, mobile, and other digital touchpoints.
Casey described Amplitude’s opportunity as broad and cross-industry, spanning financial services, retail, restaurants, and technology companies. He framed the company’s value around helping customers improve conversion and loyalty outcomes, including free-to-paid motions, better performance in loyalty programs, and repeat purchases.
From point tools to a unified platform
He compared Amplitude’s consolidation effort to moving from multiple browser windows to a single tabbed experience, arguing that a unified environment makes it easier to move from insight to action—for example, identifying a behavioral insight, running an experiment, and then targeting a cohort with messaging or feedback tools.
Looking ahead, Casey said he remains excited about two core drivers even aside from AI: consolidation in a fragmented analytics/workflow market and a go-to-market shift toward enterprise customers. He said the company has modernized its enterprise motion and believes those elements reinforce each other.
AI agents and “self-improving products”
A major theme of the discussion was Amplitude’s rollout of agentic capabilities. Casey said a “Global Agent” is now embedded in the user interface, allowing users to interact via a natural language prompt rather than navigating tools and widgets. He said this lowers the barrier to adoption and can shift usage from technical analysts toward business analysts.
Casey also outlined other agent capabilities, including automated insights that continuously monitor datasets, the ability to run experiments based on agent-generated insights, and session replay summarization that can reduce the need for teams to manually review large volumes of recordings.
He connected these capabilities to CEO Spenser Skates’ vision of “self-improving products,” where products evolve in near real time based on user interactions, supported by agents that surface insights and recommend or execute changes.
Data integration and the taxonomy challenge
Casey said a longstanding impediment to enterprise adoption has been messy underlying data taxonomy. He discussed the use of an MCP server approach that he said enables more seamless connectivity via API calls rather than rigid integrations. While he noted this does not automatically solve data quality, he said agents can help address inconsistencies.
As an example, he described a customer integrating CRM data with multiple internal definitions of ARR. Casey said an agent identified the definition used most broadly across adjacent applications and used that as the integration basis.
Pricing and packaging: simplifying adoption and predictability
Casey said Amplitude’s prior pricing and packaging created significant friction, limiting adoption due to complexity and lack of transparency. He criticized prior practices that penalized customers for usage above contracted entitlements—for example, clauses that could charge 2x or 3x when customers exceeded event limits—calling that a deterrent to broader platform use.
Amplitude maintained event-based billing, which Casey said customers view as a strong proxy for value, and noted that 86% of the install base was already on event-based volumes. The company’s change, he said, was to eliminate multiple additional meters tied to specific modules (such as experiments or sessions) and replace them with a simplified uplift model tied to data ingestion. Under this approach, adopting additional modules results in a higher per-unit rate on ingested data, aimed at improving predictability and simplifying administration.
Casey said the company tested the new model through Q4 and described instances where simplified packaging expanded deal size and contract length as customers opted to adopt more products earlier than originally planned.
Retention, go-to-market, and margins
Asked about net dollar retention, Casey said Amplitude is currently around 105% with a long-term goal of 115%. He attributed the improvement from 96% to 105% largely to cross-sell, while also describing legacy sales constructs that created renewal-driven contraction, including one large contract that allowed a 33% rate reduction at renewal despite stable usage. He said the company is “past most of those” issues, and that increasing data ingestion without those contraction dynamics can make upsells more meaningful.
Casey also highlighted the breadth of product adoption: he said 74% of customers are on two products, while only about 20% are on five products, implying room to expand within the installed base. He added that Amplitude plans to introduce new products “in the very near future” in marketing analytics and an “agentic search” area that it expects to charge for.
On customer acquisition, Casey said he wants a healthier balance between new logos and expansion. He said the company historically leaned roughly 30% new logos and 70% expansion and that management has re-architected territories and targeted demand generation more toward enterprises. He noted longer sales cycles in enterprise due to processes like MSAs, data protection agreements, and security reviews. Casey said Q4 showed a better mix, including a record number of new logos above $100,000 in new lands and 18 new Global 2000 (G2K) wins. He also said Amplitude has 162 G2Ks under contract and described that as under-penetrated.
On profitability, Casey said the largest cost to serve is hosting, primarily on AWS, with additional costs for software tools, professional services, and relatively small inference costs. He said the company has focused engineering effort on reducing marginal costs so growth in data and customers is not linear in hosting expense. He also said services revenue is about 1% today and could rise to 3% or 4% over time, with increased demand for help implementing agentic workflows, alongside plans to build a partner ecosystem.
Casey said gross margins improved year-over-year and reiterated a long-term aspiration in the low 80s, while cautioning there may be periods of demand spikes that affect results before monetization catches up. He also said sales and marketing expense is in the low 40% of revenue and needs to move toward the low 30s; G&A has improved from 17% to 12%; and he aims to keep R&D around 18% to 20% over time.
On partnerships, Casey said partner-sourced pipeline had been only about 2% when he joined. He highlighted a renegotiated AWS relationship and cited technology partners such as Klaviyo and Braze, as well as HubSpot, and services/VAR partners including Slalom and Merkle. Over time, he said the company believes partner channels should contribute more than 30% of overall pipeline, aligning with how enterprises typically buy and deploy software.
Casey also discussed evolving deal structures and longer contract terms, arguing that enterprises often prefer cost predictability and that sales teams can structure multi-year agreements with ramped pricing to accommodate transition periods from incumbents. He additionally described Amplitude’s budget origin as varying by use case—often product teams initially, but increasingly marketing and CIO environments as analytics and workflow needs converge.
About Amplitude (NASDAQ:AMPL)
Amplitude, Inc is a software company specializing in digital analytics and product intelligence solutions for businesses seeking to optimize user engagement and drive growth. Its core offering, the Amplitude Analytics platform, enables customers to collect and analyze behavioral data from web and mobile applications in real time. The platform provides advanced segmentation, funnel analysis, retention tracking and pathfinding tools that help product, marketing and data teams understand user journeys, identify friction points and measure the impact of new features.
Founded in 2012 by Spenser Skates, Curtis Liu and Jeffrey Wang, Amplitude is headquartered in Redwood City, California, with additional offices spanning North America, Europe and Asia.
