AI Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Wasim Osman: How Agile Teams Can Start Adopting AI in Software Development

“It’s like my own software has a voice now. It’s telling me—okay, you’re going to build me like this? Have you considered this?” – Wasim Osman

Wasim’s biggest current challenge is one nearly every team shares: how AI is reshaping software development. He sees a clear split—developers rapidly adopting AI-driven development, and others “not downright rejecting it, but still taking their time.” His warning is blunt: even when AI hallucinates and generates garbage code, it lets you deliver an order of magnitude faster, and the quality is only going to improve.

The early adopters are heading somewhere the late adopters won’t be able to reach. In practice, the resistance shows up as questions no one can answer: if I used to get every requirement nailed down before writing code by hand, what do I do with AI—just ask it for a one-liner and hope? Leadership often can’t help, because they lack AI experience themselves. At Orkestra SCS, the head of engineering did holistic research into how companies (like AWS, with its AI-Driven Development Lifecycle) are reshaping the process, documented it, and shared it with every team.

Feedback sessions and hands-on experiments followed, until they built a tailored version that fit how they actually work. The mindset shift that unlocked it: treat AI as a partner. Wasim describes his software “having a voice”—asking it questions he’d never think of, the way a pair-programming partner would, so the team explores the solution space instead of guessing at it.

Self-reflection Question: Is your team treating AI as a threat to write around, or as a pair-programming partner that surfaces the blind spots you’d never find alone?

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Wasim Osman

Wasim Osman is a seasoned Agile Coach and a Product Owner at Orkestra SCS. He launched his agile career at a Silicon Valley startup based in New York, then spent years coaching teams across Canada, helping organizations transform how they deliver value. Wasim brings a rare blend of agile discipline and product thinking. He’s passionate about building technology that drives real business impact.

You can link with Wasim Osman on LinkedIn.

Havva Sevay: AI vs. Real People—Helping Teams Avoid Information Overload

“It’s still a tool. It can make mistakes, it can hallucinate. People don’t really question it—and that’s the danger.” – Havva Sevay

This week’s coaching conversation tackles a challenge Havva—and many Scrum Masters—are living right now: AI vs. real people. For some, AI is a useful tool; for others, it’s a magic oracle that solves everything and makes people replaceable. Havva sees the real risk in teams that accept AI’s confident answers without double-checking, and in leaders who use AI to generate massive documents and dump them on teams as finished decisions.

Vasco pushes the conversation into the practical: when a flood of AI-generated information, requirements, and tool changes lands on a busy team, how do you help them cope?

Havva’s answer is to step back and ask the human questions first—what is the epic? what does the stakeholder actually want? what do we really need right now? Then she pulls out a deliberately low-tech move: forget AI for one second. Her team uses the Eisenhower matrix manually to separate what’s important now from what can wait. AI is a great tool—but the filtering of what matters is still human work.

Self-reflection Question: When AI floods your team with information and options, what is your practice for helping them separate what matters now from the noise?

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Havva Sevay

Havva is a people-focused organizational development expert with a Master’s in Business Administration and certification as a Scrum Master. She empowers teams and leaders through agile methodologies, modern leadership, and a strong feedback culture, fostering psychological safety and collaboration. Passionate about HR initiatives, Havva shapes people strategies, enhances employee experience, and drives inclusive, high-performing workplaces built on trust and engagement.

You can link with Havva Sevay on LinkedIn.

Alf Dobbert-Baums: When Management Writes a Book — AI, Strict Process, and the Missing Court System

“They don’t really know — do I need to follow these rules, or are they at my goodwill?” – Alf Dobbert-Baums

The developers and AI are on good terms. Then management decided to extend AI into product management — and the way to do that, of course, was stricter process. Same JIRA boards. Same columns. Same quality gates. Across every product.

Management wrote a book and called it “how we develop.” Then, in the next breath, said: “but it’s not meant to be that strict — you have flexibility.” Two messages, opposite directions.

The result, Alf describes, is confusion and psychological-safety problems. The teams don’t know whether they’re playing by the rules or breaking them. They experiment with how far they can bend the book. They fall back on “common sense” and quietly skip what makes no sense. They’ve collected feedback — structured, organized — but feel they aren’t heard. In the conversation, Vasco’s framing of the legal system (every set of rules needs a court system to interpret them) led Alf to a real experiment: take the negative rules and reframe them as positive goals.

Not “fewer meetings” — “meaningful meetings.” Then match feedback to the goal, not the rule. It’s an idea Alf came up with mid-conversation, and it’s the kind of small frame-shift that can crack open a stuck dialogue with management.

Self-reflection Question: Where in your organization is management asking people to follow rules they haven’t defined the goal for — and what would change if you reframed those rules as goals?

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Alf Dobbert-Baums

Alf lives in Berlin. He studied Theater/Religion at the Freie University Berlin. He is a Systemic Organizational Consultant, a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. He has also been a freelancer for Usability and Requirements Engineering for car manufacturers. At “Verti” he led the agile transformation.

You can link with Alf Dobbert-Baums on LinkedIn.

BONUS: From 3,000 Scripts to 3 Tools – Building AI-Last Software With Conversational AI Pioneer Peter Swimm

In this special BONUS episode, Peter Swimm—conversational AI veteran, creator of BotKit (the open-source chatbot framework that powered Slack and Teams bots), and former Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Copilot Studio—shares what 25+ years in tech taught him about working with AI. From his brutal experiment of running an entire business on voice-based AI for a week, to why he treats AI more like R2-D2 than C-3PO, Peter offers a grounded, practical perspective on where AI fits in software development teams.

From BotKit to Copilot Studio: A Front-Row Seat to the AI Evolution

“We had the number one bot in the Slack app store, because there were only 8 bots, and ours used regex. To show you how far we’ve come.”

Peter’s journey into conversational AI started with a newspaper ad and a creative writing background. When Slack launched its API, Peter and BotKit co-creator Ben Brown immediately saw that building bots wasn’t just a technical challenge—it was a social and creative one, like writing scripts for plays that interface with people in their daily lives. That insight powered BotKit into becoming the backbone of Slack and Teams bots, and eventually led to Microsoft acquiring the company. Peter spent years inside Microsoft shaping Copilot Studio, working on connectors that bridge the gap between APIs and real-world work. But the experience also gave him a healthy dose of perspective: he can show you slide decks from 2016 that promise the same things today’s AI pitches promise, always saying “within 5 years.” That pattern recognition shapes his practical, no-hype approach.

The 3,000 Scripts Experiment: Why AI-Last Beats AI-First

“At the end of the day, if I’ve been prompting all day, I should have a computer program that works offline, that works without a subscription. Otherwise, I didn’t really make anything.” Continue reading BONUS: From 3,000 Scripts to 3 Tools – Building AI-Last Software With Conversational AI Pioneer Peter Swimm

When Boundaries Vanish: The Tokenization of Work and the Wisdom of Burnout

We are living in an era of fragmented identities. The modern individual is a complex mosaic, simultaneously inhabiting a multitude of roles: expert, content creator, CEO, parent, and self-improver. The late visionary Esko Kilpi aptly described how work has shifted from a place you go to a series of interactions within networks. This vision is becoming reality faster than we realize. Professional life is becoming “tokenized,” and the danger is that this new freedom is leading more of us toward the path of burnout.

The Collapse of Transaction Costs and the Fragmentation of Work

The structures of working life are undergoing a radical transformation. Previously, working hours defined by a contract and the physical location of an office created boundaries that were easy to follow. These long-term employment contracts acted as protective walls; within them, employees were shielded from the constant bidding wars of the work market because purchasing work in tiny increments was expensive and cumbersome for companies. In economics, this is referred to as high transaction costs.

However, technology is breaking down these walls. It is now easier than ever to dismantle large projects into micro-tasks and find a performer instantly via the web. We are witnessing a collapse in transaction costs, which inevitably leads to the fragmentation of work.

Fewer of us now sell our time in a single lump sum to one employer in exchange for a monthly salary and a title. Instead, we distribute our expertise in small pieces across various channels. One piece goes to a primary job, another to a side project, a third to maintaining a social media presence, and a fourth to managing the logistics of a modern blended family. We have become portfolio managers of our own energy. Our psychological and physical strength is a currency that we invest in different activities throughout the day. This fragmentation of work into small, independent tasks can be called the tokenization of work.

In the era of AI, this development is only accelerating. When AI agents can execute individual tasks in seconds, the friction between delegating and performing work almost entirely disappears. Work threatens to become a series of lightning-fast assignments, which reflects directly onto us as humans. Life turns into an endless stream of small performances, all competing for our attention every hour of the day.

Limited Credits – Threat or Opportunity?

Recently, I have been building applications using new no-code AI tools. The experience is addictive. You fall into a state of flow, and ideas soar as the application takes shape before your eyes with astonishing speed. Rapid progress opens the dopamine taps, and the hunger to do more grows.

Then, something unexpected happens. A notification appears on the screen: “You’ve hit today’s free limit of tokens.”

Most of these tools allow for a limited number of actions per day. Once they are used, you are forced to stop. I cannot continue, even if I want to. Initially, this is frustrating, but I soon realize that running out of tokens is a blessing in disguise. Because the “chips” run out, I don’t have time to get exhausted or bored. The activity remains meaningful because it has a clear endpoint.

This experience made me reflect on how such boundaries are missing from our fragmented professional lives. When tokenized work allows us to be “on” 24/7, we lose the natural sense of when it is time to rest. Quick hits of dopamine encourage us to keep going, leading us to inadvertently spend a month’s worth of energy in a single week. In the long run, this “overconsumption” leads straight to burnout.

The Wise Compass of the Psyche

At this juncture, the thoughts of Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung offer a valuable perspective. We tend to view burnout merely as a sign that the battery is empty and the tokens have been spent. From a Jungian perspective, however, burnout is a compensatory function of the psyche. The mind naturally strives for balance.

If our conscious mind blindly pushes in one direction—toward performance, efficiency, and omnipresence—the unconscious mind begins to generate a counterforce.

Burnout is the psyche’s intelligent way of pulling the emergency brake. It doesn’t just tell us about the quantity of our effort, but also its direction. An AI tool forces you to stop when the credits run out. Burnout forces us to stop when we have invested too much energy into things that are not aligned with our true purpose.

The danger is that we scatter our energy in tiny flecks: a message here, a like there, a quick meeting, a workout in between, and a LinkedIn post in the evening. At the end of the day, the balance is zero, even if nothing truly meaningful has been achieved.

Invest in a Deeper Purpose

If we think of our energy as finite credits, every choice is an investment. The constraints set by free tools teach us prioritization: when you know you only have a certain number of tokens per day, you want to invest them wisely.

From the perspective of the psyche, tokens should be invested in a way that builds a cohesive and meaningful whole. All living beings naturally orient themselves toward broader possibilities and the fulfillment of their own potential. For humans, belonging to a larger community or whole is also essential. Realizing these things, however, requires the courage to invest energy into stopping and building a broader perspective—even if, in the eyes of a world that worships efficiency, it looks like idleness.

A quiet moment without stimulation, a walk in the forest, a deep conversation with a friend, or simply being are investments in well-being. During these moments, the mind naturally shifts toward the “big picture,” revealing what is truly important.

In a tokenized working world, one of the most vital future skills is the ability to set those boundaries yourself—the ones that technology or modern work structures no longer provide.

Stop for a moment. Check your balance. Where do you want to invest the rest of today’s precious energy? Perhaps into something that keeps you well and helps you move toward your deeper purpose?

About the Author: Ari-Pekka Skarp is a psychologist, psychotherapist, and non-fiction author conducting doctoral research on nondualism. His work, “Mindfulness, mielenselkeys ja myötätunto” (Basam Books, 2023), is a profound survival guide for people in today’s digital society. He also hosts the popular “Mielen laboratorio” (Laboratory of the Mind) podcast. www.nondual.fi