It’s 2026 and AI is all over: From your pocket’s little companion, To calculating the path of humans to Mars. It’s writing everything from student thesis to the recipe of the dish that you just relished at your favourite restaurant. It’s generating apps and website like a drunk F1 driver: Fast and furious. In fact, India is organizing its first ever Global AI Summit as I write this, where the who’s who of tech and governance are making their presence felt.
As AI spreads its reach to every nook and corner of our life, There are eons of text , bytes and videos about the benefits and perils of AI and trying to answer that familiar question: “What Next?”
But why do this sound all so familiar to me ?? As a late majority/ laggard adopter of major tech trends and tools, I have mostly been at the rear end of trying something new minus the hype and hoopla AND this time it still feels the same.
Well, not so long ago (2010-2019 era, to be precise), I was actually in the middle of such an adoption wave trying to help many organizations to adopt Agility. Trainings, Coaching, Big Investments, everyone lining up to take a piece of knowledge with them to grow and use. The Agile era was truly at its peak.
and before that it was RUP and Rational Tools and before that it was Sharepoint and .NET and before that it was Java.. the list goes on and on and on.
But as an Agile practitioner, I have been asked this question repeatedly by my students and clients alike, Oh AI is here, what next for the Agile movement ?
So, this text is my answer to some of those questions which are popping up:
So, first up, here is my simple summary of AI as I understand it:
You have some past patterns, data, trends, biases that your AI agent feasts upon. And based on the task/query you ask it to do, it rehashes, matches, redistributes and produces the answer, adding the answer itself to its repository as another pattern and there-in lies the answer to what happens to Agile in the AI world!
From its inception in 2001 by the 17 musketeers ( Yes, its 25 years old this February !), The Manifesto for Agile Software Development focused on two parts: The 4 Values and the 12 Principles. And then, we have different frameworks which are an amalgamation of best practices, aligned with those principles and values of Agile Philosophy.
So, while the core values and principles have remained the same over last 25 years ( and may be even for hundreds of years, given they represent a lot of our real life), the practices have changed, created, rehashed, adopted, discarded and reused. That’s exactly in line with the first value of the Manifesto: “Individuals and Interactions” matter more over “Process and Tools”
Now, how does this rapid adoption of AI tools and agents affect us, the Agile practitioners. Well what changes is the mundane tasks:
Write a user story, Update the data on whiteboard, Calculate the value of cycle time and lead time and on the tech side, write this repeated piece of code, run those familiar test cases, create that UI for your app that looks similar to 500 other apps.
So, my developer friend, if this is all you have been doing over the last decade, it’s time to pack bags and do something different, AI is here to take your job !!
BUT, what AI can’t still do is imagine the future, what AI can’t still do is trump human creativity and ingenuity, what AI can’t still do is manage human relationships at workplace!
So, in this AI world, to be Agile, we need to reimagine and go beyond that lazy thinking of Agile== Scrum OR SAFe. We have to start thinking what new practices we need to bring in, now that the mundane tasks are being done by AI Agents 10X faster.
We have to reimagine all those accountabilities we have been establishing and mixing up badly : Scrum Masters, POs, Agile Delivery managers (Bad), Technical Scrum Masters and Product Owners (worse), Senior Technical Agile Project Manager and Scrum Master (worst).
May be bringing back focus on how humans need to interact better, how we need to focus on innovating the future , what we can do better the next week can help.
Now that we have more time on hand while AI becomes our tech maid , its time to respond to change our following a plan and grow our ingenuity, creativity, responsiveness and collaboration to what Agile Manifesto has been preaching for the last 25 years.
To end, My verdict: the Situationship between Agile and AI seems to be a more exciting prospect to explore rather than Squaring up and Crashing out. They are not Opps but have the potential to become Besties and Pookies 😀
(The last sentence is strictly for the consumption of Gen Z , if you don’t understand it, you really are ancient like me 😉 )
