Agile transformation initiatives are losing their appeal as leaders look to cut costs and improve profitability as a slowing economy sends a wake-up signal across board-rooms. Why are agile initiatives at the forefront of cost-cutting exercise ? For many organizations, agile efforts produce sub-par or no meaningful improvements at all (State of Agile) 

AI is the new buzzword and if you are not investing in AI, there’s a good chance that you could be left behind in this maddening rush towards an AI-enabled agentic world. 

Agile transformations were meant to make your business more nimble but that came with an elaborate undertaking, focused on changing the way-of-working by embracing principles and practices that can over time help evolve a more nimble and happier organization.

The speed of change was explicitly dependent upon leadership and the organization making a conscious effort to change – Agile methods provided a view into what needed to change and how you could implement change but it still required leaders to lead from the front, owning the change, getting others onboard and following through on agile transformations. That was and is a big ask for any leader. 

AI transformation takes that burden away and promise change which isn’t rooted in your desire and discretion but in the technology that can show almost instantaneously how you could achieve higher throughput, shorten lead time, get products faster to market and cut costs – everything that agile promised but without the long hard toil that agile asked off of you. 

Its easy to see how AI-enabled services, GenAI and Agentic workforce can be so appealing. However Agile transformations didnt lose out just to AI, they also lost because of advertising a goal that for most large organizations is impossible to achieve – becoming an agile organization turned out to be a lifelong goal and many employees sought that as an apt career transition and a happy retirement that promised by preaching agile without being accountable for specific outcomes. This is why you see a plethora of agile coaches in many organizations today and their utility is being questioned ever so often. 

Almost all agile efforts do a good job of providing visibility into problem areas – it could be lack of resources, chaining of dependencies, lack of visibility into backlog items, complex portfolios causing capacity and funding issues etc but the job of solving those problems is conveniently left to the leaders and decision makers. Agile methods either dont provide a solution or are so conceptual in nature that implementations are often an uphill battle against prevailing norms / culture causing much anxiety among leaders that few have the courage to push for it. 

Majority of agile efforts are delegated to department managers, where self-interest and job preservation almost always supersede implementing corrective measures suggested by Agile initiatives – thus agile effectiveness is mostly contained within the guardrails set by managers especially when they are also responsible for funding such initiatives. 

Since AI initiatives take the onus away from humans, digesting massive data sets, analysing patterns in historical data and presenting a solution (instead of providing visibility into a problem), there’s an almost instant acceptance and a desire to implement said solution. 

Agile transformations aren’t done just yet, there’s still benefit in implementing agile methods, principles and values regardless of how AI evolution influences organizations. It remains to be seen how agile light-bearers would address this latest challenge. 

Comment below on how agile transformations are evolving in your organization and how you perceive AI’s influence in the agile space.