Remember when every organisation wanted to become Agile? Millions have been invested in transformation programmes, new ways of working, training and organisational restructuring. The promise has always been that organisations would become more responsive to change, deliver value faster and better meet customer needs.
Yet looking at many organisations today, I can’t help wondering how much has actually changed. Decisions still take too long, priorities constantly compete, work gets stuck between departments, and organisations struggle to respond when customer needs or market conditions change. Despite years of transformation efforts, many of the original challenges remain.
So what is going wrong? Is Agile really the problem, or are organisations misunderstanding what they are trying to achieve? And with AI now entering the picture, are we about to make those same challenges even bigger?
Are Organisations Implementing Agile Without Becoming Agile?
One of the biggest mistakes I continue to see organisations make is focusing on implementing Agile rather than actually becoming agile. They introduce frameworks, new roles, processes and tools, but often fail to challenge the fundamental ways the business operates.
Many still operate with a traditional project mindset rather than moving towards a product mindset. Funding is allocated to projects, teams are formed to deliver predefined scope, and success is measured by whether the project is completed on time and within budget. But how often does leadership stop to question whether the investment is actually creating the expected business value?
The same applies to leadership and decision-making. Organisations talk about empowering teams, yet decisions still have to travel through multiple management layers. They want greater adaptability but continue expecting detailed long-term plans and fixed commitments, even when circumstances change.
In many cases, organisations are changing their processes without fundamentally changing how they operate. And that is a very expensive way of achieving very little.
Why AI Adoption Doesn’t Automatically Lead to Business Value
Today, AI is dominating conversations in boardrooms and executive meetings. Organisations are investing heavily in technology, setting AI adoption targets and expecting significant productivity improvements. The pressure to embrace AI is enormous, particularly when competitors are claiming they can deliver work ten or even twenty times faster.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe AI creates incredible opportunities for businesses. But I am concerned that many organisations are once again becoming so focused on implementing something new that they forget to ask what they are actually trying to achieve.
If an organisation struggles with prioritisation, what happens when AI enables employees to produce ten times more work? If decisions take weeks because of unnecessary approval processes, will AI really help the organisation deliver value faster? And if teams are already spending time developing products or features that customers don’t need, what exactly is the business gaining by producing even more?
There is a significant difference between making people more productive and making an organisation more effective. Yet we often seem to assume that one automatically leads to the other.
This is where I believe business leaders need to challenge the conversation. Rather than asking how quickly AI can be rolled out across the organisation, perhaps the starting point should be understanding what is actually preventing the business from delivering value today. Where is work getting stuck? Why are decisions taking so long? What activities are consuming resources without creating meaningful outcomes?
Once those challenges are understood, AI becomes a potential solution to a real business problem rather than another transformation programme driven by technology adoption targets.
What If Adaptability Is the Real Competitive Advantage?
What excites me most about AI isn’t simply the possibility of doing existing work faster. It’s the opportunity to fundamentally rethink how organisations operate, how decisions are made and how value is delivered to customers.
But technology alone won’t make that happen. It requires leaders who are willing to challenge existing structures, question long-held assumptions, experiment with different approaches and change direction when something isn’t working. Interestingly, those are exactly the capabilities organisations have been trying to develop through Agile for years.
I strongly believe the future won’t belong to organisations with the most technology, but to those with the greatest ability to learn, adapt and evolve. AI doesn’t change that belief. If anything, it makes it even more relevant.
If your organisation failed its Agile transformation, chances are it will fail its AI transformation too. Not because the technology isn’t good enough, but because the same organisational challenges are still there.
So before investing in another transformation programme, perhaps leadership teams should ask themselves: What prevented our Agile transformation from delivering the results we expected? Which of those challenges are still present today? And what are we going to do differently this time?
Because the opportunity with AI isn’t just to make the organisation faster. It’s to make it better.
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About the author: Malene Jacobsen is the founder of Agile Training Alliance, a Certified Scrum Trainer and a member of the Scrum Alliance Board of Directors. She has extensive experience helping organisations improve their ways of working, develop organisational agility and focus on delivering real business value.
