AI in Agile Companies

In the agile community, documents such as the "Scrum Guide Expansion Pack" try to guide the use of AI in agile organizations, but the truth is they can be double-edged swords: they can help use AI on the foundations of agility, or they can be the perfect pretext to perpetuate old habits disguised as agility. Specifically, the "Scrum Guide Expansion Pack" devotes considerable effort to reminding us that "the human comes first" and that AI should only be a "cognitive augmentation," but at the same time it dwells in detail on the efficiency that artificial intelligence brings.

But it can happen that the pressure for results tips the balance toward optimization and turns good humanistic intentions into empty rhetoric.

The Hidden Crossroads in the Same Framework

For a company's culture, the "Scrum Guide Expansion Pack" is a Rorschach test, reflecting the culture it already has. The company can project its values onto the text and find the confirmation it needs to validate its approach.

An organization centered on people looks in the text for inspiration to validate or develop its culture of trust, creativity, and people development and, of course, finds it:

• It finds servant leadership rather than command: It confirms its belief in servant leadership by reading that its role is "…to cultivate the environment for self-managing Scrum Teams…". It understands the meaning of nurturing and removing obstacles, not directing or controlling.
• It finds in self-management an engine of innovation by reading that "Self-managing Scrum Teams organized around value are crucial for creative problem solving and capturing emergence". It validates that self-management is the path to unleashing collective potential in the face of complexity.
• It puts AI at the service of human talent, reinforcing its view of technology as a lever for people, by reading that AI should allow "…the human members of the Scrum Team to focus on strategic, creative, and ethical considerations". AI is an assistant that frees people up, not a substitute that optimizes.

But at the same time, an organization with a culture rooted in efficiency, predictability, and process control looks in the same document for justification to refine and accelerate its productive machinery, and it also finds it:

• It finds in Lean Thinking the pretext for extreme efficiency: Lean thinking "…reduces waste in the work and in how it is carried out…". Waste is anything that is not direct production, so "unnecessary" debates can be eliminated and processes standardized to maximize flow.
• It finds in AI the path toward automating control: It gets excited reading that AI can "…update and reprioritize the Product Backlog items…" or that its "…AI-based analyses improve transparency, inspection, and adaptation", seeing here advice to replace human judgment with efficient algorithms that optimize performance at scale.
• It finds in accountability a mechanism of compliance: It rigidly defines professionalism by finding that developers are "…collectively accountable for: Establishing quality by adhering to and improving the Definition of Output Done". Accountability becomes conformity with the standard, and quality becomes a checklist the system must pass. For this organization, "agility" is a suitable framework for modernizing Taylorism, with a cutting-edge veneer, without altering its core of control and efficiency.

Both organizations apply the "Pack," and in both cases the result is the intensification of the culture they already had.

When the Framework Stops Being a Map and Becomes a Mirror

An ambiguous framework can work as a mirror that reflects the culture and pre-existing intentions. For an organization centered on people, the framework validates and reinforces its approach, but so it does for an organization centered on the product.

It can be an echo of what the organization already is, and the danger runs deeper when it is used not as a mirror but as a mask. Because ambiguity allows adopting the rhetoric of people-centered agility—"empowerment," "self-management," "psychological safety," etc.—to build a facade without consistent reality behind it.

The Consequences: Cynicism, Stagnation, and Devaluation

For people, the cynicism of organizations that preach humanism but practice Taylorism is exhausting. It kills trust, motivation, and with them, creativity.

For the organization, the result is a stalled transformation. Rituals are adopted, but without changing the cultural DNA, confusing activity with progress.

And for the community, the result is the devaluation of the term "agile," which loses its meaning and becomes a set of tools that any culture can adopt.