Enterprise Agility is the Real AI Enabler

The way most people are thinking about Agile and AI is just too small.

Video Transcript

I don’t pay a ton of attention to what we might consider like the agile community or the agile thought leadership community, but it seems like the people who I hear talking about AI, because everybody wants to put AI on top of whatever it is they’re doing, they’re talking about one of two things. How do I do AI for code generation? How do I become a more effective incremental and iterative developer slash software craftsman, what have you?

And then the other side that I think is interesting is how do I leverage AI? I’ve seen things like story writing or process stuff. I’ve also seen it in the space of iterating outcomes with ai. I think it kind of misses the point when we think about something like Agile and ai. We’re fundamentally asking ourselves is how does Agile enable ai? But I think to even answer that question, you have to define agile as leading agile defines agile, which has been contrarian in market for a long time. It’s interesting to me that when we take leading Agile’s point of view on what does it mean to really do agile well, right?

We want to extract technology components, wrap teams around them, align them to the business, get them into a state where they can deliver incrementally and iteratively where we can get fast feedback and then we enable it with agile practices and we measure the right things and we change the culture over time. I think when you take a more expanded and integrated view of agile and agile transformation, the way that we’ve thought about it and our change management methodologies around getting there, I think the insight is that when you take that expanded view of agile and agile transformation, what we’re fundamentally doing is, that process is getting ready for ai. That process is enabling private equity mergers and acquisitions or business capability focused models. It’s enabling us to effectively scale the cloud and strategically take costs out of it. It’s effectively getting the organization to be able to deliver better, faster products that are more applicable to market.

With our expansive view of agile and transformation, it kind of starts to make sense how this thing we’ve been doing around enterprise transformation is an enabler of all these other things. I think what’s confusing is when you start to think about how do I use Scrum to do AI better, or how do I use copilot to become a better agile developer? I think that’s too small.

So it’s like when you look at Agile as a fundamentally different operating model that requires transformation, what you’re fundamentally doing is you are enabling these things that we’ve been talking about. So what LeadingAgile’s I think doing is recognizing to some degree that the word agile has been largely commodified. The practice of agile has been largely commodified. It’s been largely reduced to the implementation of practices or culture or values, and I think it’s necessary for us to credibly speak about this, that we have to say no, it’s not just agile that enables ai. It’s the transformative process that allows you to build products better, faster, more efficiently, get them to market in time, are the same fundamental things that are going to allow us to solve ultimately any problem in a technology enabled business.

When we really think about reinventing agile, we think about what does it mean to do it at scale? We think about alignment between technology and the business. We get all the benefits of agility and those benefits of agility enabled these other things we’re talking about.