Agile in the Age of AI: Series Intro
Remember Agile?
I do. It's been a significant chapter of my professional life, one I devoted years to preaching, practicing, and genuinely believing in. At SolutionsIQ, we used to frame our mission in terms of a higher purpose: bringing humanity to the workplace. Agile wasn't just a methodology. It was a movement. And now that shine has faded a bit.
The Agile market has been in a downturn. The market for Agile coaching and transformation, which had grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, began contracting in earnest, as many of my former SolutionIQ colleagues have confirmed to me. The use of the Scrum Master role for Agile teams dropped from 54% of teams using that role in 2020 to only 37% in 2025. From 2022 to 2023, as shown in the State of Agile Report, satisfaction in Agile had dropped from 71% to 59%.
Agile and the Agile practices are by no means dead. In fact, over 85% of all teams in a recent survey claim they still use various Agile practices. However the Agile cloak has clearly tarnished. Even those respondenting to the State of Agile survey dropped by 90% from 2023 to 2025. Less Agile roles, less Agile enthusiasm.
The “movement” led to wide adoption, multiple frameworks, and an alphabet soup of certifications embedded in signature blocks. Demonstrating proficiency in Agile practices became the goal rather than first building a foundation on the principles. In many cases the quest for Agile certificates replaced the continuous learning core Agile Tenet.
Yet the premise for Agile Adoption remains
The original argument for Agile rested on a premise about the marketplace: that it had become too volatile, too unpredictable, for the old waterfall paradigm to hold. Build a big plan, execute it over eighteen months, deliver it to a world that had already moved on: this was the failure mode Agile was designed to address. The market was changing faster and the traditional project management approach could not keep up.
Agile didn't wane because the principles were wrong. Instead, in many organizations, because the principles were never really tried. The ceremony was adopted, but the mindset wasn't. Yet, the impact of the Agile movement remains omnipresent. The vocabulary of Agile is now part of the standard operating language of knowledge work. Backlog, sprint, product owner, acceptance criteria, user story, say these words in virtually any software organization, and not only will people understand you, they're almost certainly living many of these concepts every day.
But these days, who has time to even consider Agile, with the new darling Artificial Intelligence dominating headlines. As a former CEO of SolutionsIQ and someone who spent years inside the Agile movement, I see where we stand now looking at the AI wave. This is not an out with the old (Agile), in with the new (AI) moment. Rather we are seeing that the core Agile premise of market uncertainty is now confirmed daily with the AI impact on the market place. This moment is not where AI replaces or overshadows the Agile movement, but rather this is a reaffirmation of the need for Agile principles. These principles not only continue to be relevant but more necessary than ever for an enterprise to manage successfully with the paradigm shift towards an AI centric world.
Innovations that once took years to reach market now take months. Months, in some cases, are becoming weeks. AI is hyper-compressing every stage of the product life cycle. Ideas become products in days, not months. One of the most popular desktop AI applications, Claude Code, was built and shipped in just 10 days. Competitive moats are in constant peril. Amazon's internal teams showed that spec-driven, agentic development can radically accelerate complex engineering programs; turning a rearchitecture effort originally scoped for 30 developers over 18 months into a project completed by six engineers in just 76 days (source).
The predictions were correct. This is the environment Agile was preparing organizations for, and ironically now most organizations aren't ready for the version of it that's actually arriving.
Business Agility’s new relevance
Arriving perhaps a few beats before its time, Business Agility promised organizational capability to absorb signals from the market, route them through fast decision-making cycles, act on near-term opportunities, and measure results in time to influence the next iteration. This is the core principle of Agile. Now, if you have been swimming in the current disruptive, often chaotic, wake that has come from rapid AI adoption; please re-read this paragraph. While aptly describing the aspirational Business Agility, this approach seems almost like an AI adoption survivor guild. The 2010s may have been before its time, but Business Agility is now more relevant and necessary than ever. Business Agility was a nice-to-have for most software based organizations and generally ignored by more traditional industries. Today, it is a survival requirement for all.
For industries that have ignored Agile, it is time to start paying attention. The future requires companies to not simply "talk the talk" on Agile, but to truly enable autonomy, cross-functional collaboration, adapt lean processes, and empower their people (back to the principles).
Continuous Innovation, today’s north star
At LightSight, we talk about continuous innovation as the new baseline. Not a program you run, not a transformation you complete, but a permanent operating mode. You can see obvious parallels to Business Agility. We preach: map your critical workflows, find the domain experts stuck in the routine, and empower them with the knowledge and means to shape their work. Enable them to extricate from bottlenecks and overhaul entire workflows rather than being stuck on a single step. This means always building, always observing, and always letting what you shape what you build next. While certainly reflective of Agile principles, this is now rapidly becoming a core organizational requirement for companies seeking success in this new age.
It is no longer sufficient to optimize the current state
How have we traditionally addressed market or technology changes? An organization identifies a need for change. They bring in change management consultants. A rollout program is designed. Six months later, the program is in full swing. A year later, it's declared complete. Cultural adoption, as it always does, lags behind the official timeline. By the time the organization has absorbed the change, this new world has already changed…twice.
That was always the flaw in the change management model. But in a lower-velocity environment, organizations could absorb the lag. They can't anymore.
The new status quo is continuous movement. Organizations that treat their current state as stable, as something to be maintained rather than constantly iterated, are building on a foundation that the market is actively eroding beneath them. If we don't build the capability for continuous improvement (the foundation to achieve continuous innovation) into our processes, and more importantly into our cultures, we won't just fall behind. We'll find ourselves unable to catch up at all.
Agile Practices Re-visited
Agile was ahead of its time, or perhaps more accurately, the world wasn't yet moving fast enough to make its urgency undeniable. That's no longer the case. This need for addressing market change continuously will require organizations to lean on the Agile principles, pick up the Business Agility initiatives of yesterday, and lean into a new world rewarding continuous innovation as a core competency.
In addition, this increased pace of change requires a new look at Agile practices as some no longer optimize managing work. While the principles of Agile have become even more relevant with shortened feedback cycles and competition with increasing capabilities, it is time to reexamine and in some cases re-calibrate the practices given the new realities organizations are facing.
Examples of practices worthy of examination under this new AI paradigm include:
- Are two week iterations too long?
- Is the scrum process too heavy?
- How does the explosion of rapid prototyping impact the user stories?
- With Agentic coding, are “two-pizza” teams a thing of the past?
- What about XP?
This LightSight Blog Series on Agile in the age of AI will explore these and other questions about how best to leverage core Agile principles. In some cases, this means modifying standard Agile practices to create competitive advantage in the AI era.
This series will use both real examples of Agile applications from LightSight clients and explore how others are adapting Agile practices to fit the new realities of AI.