AI has become a significant part of our lives, and there are claims that Scrum Masters may be replaced by AI. In this video, I’m going to explore the validity of such claims.
While AI can generate quality responses, the critical question is whether generative AI truly understands its answers. The answer to this determines if AI poses a real threat to Scrum Master roles.
I asked this question of three famous AI tools: Do Generative AIs really understand their answers?!
ChatGPT answered: “No, generative AI models like ChatGPT or DALL·E do not truly "understand" their answers in the way humans do. They generate outputs based on patterns in the data they have been trained on and operate without genuine comprehension, intention, or awareness.”
Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot gave the same answer: No. Generative AIs don’t understand their answers.
In fact, generative AIs are highly advanced tools that excel at generating human-like text or images, but their "understanding" is an illusion. Consider a parrot that has learned to mimic human speech. It can repeat phrases and even construct grammatically correct sentences, but it doesn't understand the meaning of what it says.
A Scrum Master's responsibilities can be divided into two main categories.
1- Administrative Work
2- Human-side Work
As AI is great at doing repetitive work and mimicking the human-like administration, it can be a huge help to Scrum Masters in streamlining their duties of the administrative work category. Let’s check some examples:
1- Facilitation: AI tools can help the team have more effective collaboration. As an example, Otter.ai as an AI meeting assistant can create transcripts, summaries, and action items of a meeting.
2- Creating Reports: it can help the team generate quality reports of the Sprint and broadcast it to stakeholders to keep transparency high.
3- Metrics Analysis: they can meaningfully collect, analyze, and generate insights based on the metrics data giving the team a quality ground to have better conversations about their performance.
The second category is human-side work. As you saw, AIs don’t understand their responses. They process data and create outputs based on probabilities, not genuine comprehension or awareness. While they can simulate understanding effectively, their answers are ultimately a product of pattern recognition, not true intelligence.
Generative AIs don’t have beliefs, desires, emotions, experience, and empathy. So, the takeaway is that Scrum Masters are still required to take over the team’s human-side work, including:
- Coaching
- Mentoring
- Empathy
- Reading the room
- Leading by example
- Creating and maintaining trust
- Ingraining Scrum Values
- Ensuring empiricism; and
- Establishing self-management, to name a few.
But there is a caveat:
AI has the potential to change the way of product building.
Each Sprint is an experiment and learning loop. One of the factors that affects the Sprint length is the Developers ability to create releasable Done Increment.
But you know that AI is dramatically changing the way of coding and programming. In the past, Developers needed a relatively long time (a few days or weeks) to write code and develop a feature. But now with the emergence of programming with prompts which is completely close to the human natural language writing, the required amount of time for developing the same feature is becoming less and less.
Consequently, teams will need fewer Developers leading to smaller Scrum Teams. This case for Scrum Masters means they will be probably requested to work with more Scrum Teams. The result may be relatively less demand for the Scrum Master job in the market.
So, if you want to secure your job, you should enhance your AI-related skills.
It is a great way of thinking that AI is not your competitor, but instead augments and completes you as an assistant. However, using this assistant effectively needs a new skill set.
I believe we will be seeing a wave of AI Transformation across the software industry. We will have new duties for Scrum Masters like knowing what AI-powered tools are available, suggesting, setup and combining them in the Scrum Team’s process.
Scrum Masters will be a thought leader to define how the AI potential can be combined with the overall process creating a smooth flow of value delivery.
So, instead of just passively witnessing the AI emergence, start investing in making yourself that AI-powered Scrum Master that the market will be demanding soon. Very soon.
What do you think? Comment it below.