Agile 2026 is a wrap, and Kate and Anu came home with full notebooks and a single phrase they cannot shake: we are in the age of perpetual transformation.
This year’s theme was “shaping the future with agility.” Fitting, because the future is exactly what the whole room was trying to figure out. Fresh off the conference, Kate Megaw and Anu Smalley sat down with Ryan Smith to unpack what they saw, what worried them, and what gives them hope.
Inside: the partnership that finally brought two worlds together, the moment AI stopped being the headline and became the plumbing, the most horrifying thing they heard all week, and why going back to basics might be the boldest move in agile right now.
If your organization feels like it is in flux too, you are in good company. Read on.
Two Worlds, One Room
Every year, a theme rises out of the conference. Fourteen years ago, when we first met, it was scaling. This year the banner read “shaping the future with agility,” and that is precisely what everyone in the building seemed to be doing: standing in the middle of a shift and trying to shape a future nobody can quite see yet.
We just got back, and we sat down with Ryan to talk it through while it was still fresh. Here is our honest field report: the highs, the lows, the one moment that made us wince, and the phrase that is going to stick with us all year.
For years, the agile conference and the project management conference were different tribes. Scrum Masters over here, Project Managers over there, each a little suspicious of the other. As both Scrum Masters and Project Managers, it’s always been a bit strange for us being part of both camps! This year that wall was gone. The PMI and Agile Alliance partnership has solidified, and you could feel it in the room. It was not a project management event with only project managers. It was not the traditional agile event with only Scrum Masters. We were all in it together, working the same problems from different angles.
That alone felt like progress. When the people who argue about frameworks and the people who argue about plans finally sit at the same table, the conversation gets more honest.
AI Stopped Being the Headline
Last year, a lot of people stapled “AI” to the front of their session title because that was the word that filled a room. This year, something better happened. AI stopped being the shiny new thing and settled into the DNA of how we work.
The best sessions were not “using AI as a Scrum Master.” They were “being a good Scrum Master, and here is how AI supports that.” AI showed up under the other topics, woven in, part of the operating system rather than the main event. It is not new anymore. It is just there, part of everything we do.
That is the good news. Here is the catch. The human is still an afterthought. Session after session, the energy went into how to build the agents and automate the work, and then, almost as a footnote, “oh, and let’s keep a human in the loop.” That is backwards.
Anu has a line for this that is becoming her next mantra: the psychology of AI. AI gives you outputs. Humans create outcomes. You can have one without the other, but AI on its own rarely gets you to an outcome that matters. Her favorite way to explain it: AI can hand you a perfect recipe for an eighteen-year-old single malt, every step, every ingredient. But there is not a single AI on the planet that can taste that scotch and go, “wow, that is extraordinary.” The recipe is outputs. The magic is human.
The Most Horrifying Moment of the Week
We were running our session on the KatAnu R3 facilitation framework, talking about how to design genuinely good meetings and events. We went around the room asking people which meeting they would redesign.
One attendee said, brightly, that they were going to use AI to run the entire Daily Scrum so their team would not have to be involved. Kate opened her mouth. Anu, from behind, gave the small, firm shake of the head that means do not open that can of worms. Because where do you even start? Point your AI at the Jira board and let it run the Daily Scrum, and you have quietly deleted the individuals and interactions that the whole manifesto is built on. It was, honestly, one of the most horrifying moments of the event.
AI is a disruptor. No argument. The question is whether it disrupts in a positive direction or a negative one, and the only way to land on the positive side is to truly believe that AI and the human are partners. Not the human as an afterthought. Partners.
An Industry in Flux
Here is the harder truth, and Anu said it plainly. Our industry has shifted, and nobody actually knows what is broken yet. You cannot fix what you cannot name.
The market has changed. Companies are not looking for a specific title or certification the way they used to, but they also do not know what they do want. They cannot describe the problem, so they cannot describe the hire. Everywhere you look, roles have morphed. In a session on the last day, we asked a room of 150 people how many were “just” a Scrum Master. One hand went up. Everyone else was a delivery manager, a technical project manager, a release train engineer, a Scrum-Master-slash-project-manager, some blend of five things.
PMI has done a masterful job making the PMP the credential people brag about. When did you last see someone post “I just got my CSM!” with the same pride? The agile frameworks are not a thing of the past, but their relevance to organizations has to be reinvented, and that reinvention has to happen at the C-suite level, not just with the Scrum Master who often cannot even see the organization’s biggest problems. The word that kept coming up was flux. We are in flux. We just cannot pinpoint it yet.
Going Back to Basics Is the Radical Move
Amid all the AI and enterprise-agility talk, the session that filled the most pages in Kate’s notebook was about leadership and psychological safety. One line: psychological safety is the courage to speak up and the confidence to be heard. It is the operating system that lets people tell the truth.
And in a session on feedback, we watched seasoned people at our table have a small revelation about how to give and receive it. That is the tell. For all the talk of agents and automation, there are still people who have not mastered the basics of a good feedback conversation. The lesson we keep relearning: you have to go back to the fundamentals over and over, and not in the same way seven times. You make them relatable, in the language of the person’s own industry, again and again.
A lot of teams are already acting with an agile mindset without calling it that. The opportunity is not to hand them a new framework. It is to help them do more of what is already working.
What We Want From Agile 2027
We closed the conversation with Ryan on our hopes for next year. First, that it happens at all, and that more people come. These events keep getting smaller, and the real value is the hallway conversation, the five-minute “how are you,” the reconnection with people we have known for fifteen or eighteen years. Anu missed the ones who chose not to come this year. The human side of the conference is the point.
Second, a sharper focus. This year’s theme was broad. We would love 2027 to zero in on agility at the organizational and C-suite level, and on the psychology of AI. Not “AI for the CEO,” but leaders doing their own jobs better, stronger, faster with AI as a partner.
Kate’s hope: to feel, by 2027, like we are on more solid ground. That we know our purpose and our why. The world is going to keep changing whether we are ready or not, and the theme said it best. Shaping the future with agility is not something you do once. It is a mindset you live.
The One Line to Take Home
If you take a single thing from this recap, take Kate’s favorite phrase from Agile 2026, because it is the truest description of the moment we are in: we are in the age of perpetual transformation.
The industry is in flux. AI is in the plumbing now, not the headline. The roles are morphing, the market is redrawing itself, and nobody has all the answers, us included. That is not a reason to freeze. It is a reason to get clear on your purpose, keep the human at the center, and keep adapting, because the organizations and the people who can pivot are the ones who will not get left behind.
We will see you on the road.