You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

The future of work starts now. No, wait. Now. Oof, it already started.

I am insatiably curious and driven by stimulating, future-driven conversations about interesting topics like the future of work, agility, innovative software products, etc. So, naturally, when I got an invite to a community that was all about AI&Agile, I was intrigued.

My immediate questions were:

• What is the angle? Are we talking about Agility in AI? Or AI in Agility?

• What is the goal? Are we creating a manifesto? A tool? A community?

After the first few conversations, I think some of the questions are still being answered, and we’re still discussing the different possible visions of a future where AI and Agility converge.

My own personal vision, which I started to articulate in our recent group meeting, is that there are 2 futures being developed now.

Future #1 - AI-enhanced/augmented short term

In the immediate future, all the tools will add AI features that will simplify agile collaboration, e.g.

• Recording, Transcribing, and memorializing meetings and ceremonies (e.g. Otter.ai), with further capabilities to summarize and translate the discussions, identifying and assigning action items.

• Assist in the creation of documentation

• Help team members come up to speed with the context of a product or projects faster.

• Support scrum teams in scheduling, communications, automatic reporting, nudging, etc.

These and many other features will be driven by the companies that build the products that are currently being used for project and product management.

A report from Gartner (in 2019, so way before COVID, WFH and ChatGPT leapfrogged us into the future of work), estimated that by 2030 the vast majority (80%) of PM tasks would be eliminated as artificial intelligence takes over. I would be very curious to see the updated projection.

And to keep abreast of this conversation, it would be valuable to follow some of the people who are working on that, like the CEO of Asana. And of course, there are up-and-coming competitors that will try to disrupt that status quo, like Motion by claiming to be more “AI-native” and less “AI-enhanced”.

This is cool and all, and some will capitalize on it in the next few years. But that’s just the beginning…

Future #2 - AI will disrupt and transform agility in the long(er) term.

Based on the enhancements introduced by Future #1, the methodologies, tools, and ceremonies, will need to evolve to support the new ways of work. As AI can be trusted to do more of the coding, for example, some of the ceremonies, practices, and artifacts of current agile methodologies for software development will no longer be relevant. Some new ones may need to emerge. Many of the roadblocks to collaboration will be lifted (co-location, synchronicity, language barriers, shared context).

• Pushing things a bit, one can dream about trained LLMs being included in some of the conversations. Imagine, for example, a Large Language Model trained to participate in a meeting and ask questions from the perspective of the user personas, or from other stakeholders (these shortcuts are never as direct and effective as talking to actual people, but they can be useful nevertheless). Or an LLM trained to help facilitate discussions, be the timekeeper on meetings, suggest team exercises (from a large DB of meeting facilitation techniques), evaluate engagement and encourage participation, etc.

• Or a ML tool that can understand patterns in the discussion and understand whether the topics have been discussed in other meetings by other teams. Or whether the obstacles were identified (and resolved) in other forums.

The vision on this more -but not quite- distant future, is still a bit blurry, but that’s what the community and the discussion are for, right?

I am looking forward to further talks with other community members (I have already scheduled some individual conversations so that we don’t have to wait for group forums). As we explore different topics, I’ll try to share some of the very interesting insights from the very smart people that are part of AI&Agile.

A question for you

As I stated at the beginning of the article, I am very curious. So I would like to know: how do YOU think AI will transform agility?

(NOTE: I generated the illustrations through Leonardo.ai, and I thought of fixing the weird fingers, but eventually decided to leave it as a commentary about GenAI not being perfect quite yet, but getting closer very fast)

Please share your thoughts on the comments, and share with your network so they can also join the discussion. We need more voices!