It’s hard to select just a few of our a-ha moments from the Scrum Alliance Gathering in New Orleans, but these were our favorite takeaways, lessons, and thoughts.
One of the most popular topics that kept appearing was AI and Agility. In the “Navigating Tomorrow: The Future of Agile and Scrum Panel” with Tristian Boutros, Mike Cohn, Laura Powers, Shika Carter, Steve Martin, and Samar Elatta, when asked “What role do you see AI playing in our space” some of the answers that resonated with us were:
As leaders, it’s our responsibility to be informed about AI to help our teams get through the change.
It’s going to be destructive to many organizations, but with Agile and Scrum, it’s a great opportunity. And we’re going to need business agility at the core of every business.
AI is like any other tech hype cycle and we need to consider:
- How do we embrace it?
- How do we help our teams with it?
- How does it augment our team?
- We need to look at it as a “co-pilot” for our teams!
AI will lead to :
- Smaller team sizes—We’re going to be able to do more work with fewer people
- More projects will become economically viable
- Changes in roles in a Scrum environment, product owner and business analysts in more important roles and “prompt engineers” as part of teams!
- AI right now is garbage in, garbage out. And so much as what you ask it is what it’s going to sort of return to you. So you have to figure out what the right questions.
AI is like any other tool, like a search engine or Microsoft Word or Excel. And our success with it is going be based on how we embrace it. If you’re a product owner that doesn’t use AI, you’re going to get run over by the product owner that does. If you’re a Scrum Master that doesn’t use AI, you’re going to get run over by the Scrum Master that does.
It will help us “Make Work Fun Again.”
- It’s going to take some of the stress out of projects if we have our prompt engineers asking the right questions.
- The mental drudgery and monotony will go away.
- For developers, it’s going to allow them to write code faster.
What would be your short phrase to summarize the “Future of Agile & Scrum”
- Tristan – it’s more important than ever and at forefront of the revolution we’ve been talking about over the past couple of days
- Laura – Catalyzing productive human centric change
- Mike – time to get a tattoo – it’s the subtitle of Kent Beck’s book “Embrace Change”