Will AI kill your role?
Not if a Delivery Manager can help it
I keep reading that AI is going to kill my current job/role.
So, in the only way I know how to do these things, I am writing an irreverent newsletter, casting Agile Team Members as Cluedo characters, with a description of how Agile will kill their role, where – and if this is really going to be the case.
A couple of things to remember:
I am a Delivery person at heart
I am often asked to promote and showcase AI as part of bid work and new engagements
A final point to note:
This is written very much, tongue in cheek (Met een knipoog… Sur le ton de l'ironie… Nicht ganz ernst gemeint etc)
While technically not one of the designated Agile roles, I am going to start with Delivery Managers, as if anything changes to my current circumstances as a middle-manager with an American job title, it’s my bread and butter – the old Delivery game (man and boy).
Delivery Manager Magenta
Where will they die? Either in a PowerPoint Deck or a Whiteboard, project kick off session.
What will kill them? An AI Prompt asking, “Can you produce a project plan and a report every month on the progress we are making against our target outcome.”
What might save them? An SRO refusing to say please to AI, but more likely, the same person not being happy with AI telling them that it is impossible to deliver the project to time, scope and budget - based on the information provided.
Will AI kill the roll? I am already seeing several projects running without any “non-technical” roles, so I think funding and assumptions might already have beaten AI. However, if you need to blame a human, be sure to have a Delivery Manager to hand.
Scrum Master Scarlet
Where will they die? In a burndown chart auto populated in Jira.
What will kill them? CoPilot solving all issues and therefore no one will ever have a blocker again. (Side-eyes glance to camera).
What might save them? That burndown chart only works if people update their Jira tickets, and we know that’s never going to happen.
Will AI kill the roll? It’s rare to see pure Agile applied across development teams and their organisations, but there’s also a misplaced view that this is a luxury role that could be picked up by another team member. If the DM is in danger, the Scrum Master is also clinging to a door in the middle of the Atlantic.
Product Manager Pinky
Where will they die? In a User Research session, where the users are two different computers talking to each other.
What will kill them? The intelligence in AI, knowing what the user needs and prioritising work, based on how poorly the service is used.
What might save them? Humans dismissing the views and needs of other humans, and therefore the Intelligence never understands why those decisions have been made.
Will AI kill the roll? Product Ownership is a tricky one. In some cases, they are seen as super SMEs, in others – it is a role created, but with little background knowledge of the product they are assigned to, which leaves the team knowing more than the Product Owner. Someone will need to make the decisions even if the roll doesn’t exist in the team.
Software Engineer Salmon
Where will they die? Software Engineers never die – they simply black box their work and put kill switches in the code.
What will kill them? Being asked to wear a shirt and tie.
What might save them? A bulletproof branded polo provided at a conference.
Will AI kill the roll? More like, will they kill AI. Software Engineers are the first and last line of defence against the megalomaniacs. And the return of Clippy!
There are some other roles worth looking at, that while not core Agile team members, they exist in the same world. How will they fare?
Business Analysts: Much like Delivery and Scrum, these are all too often seen as luxury roles; often underpaid for the work they do. If AI is running your user research, it will also do your analysis as well. Verdict – cost and budget got there first.
User Researchers: Humans like talking to Humans now, but how many generations are we from people never speaking again? At that point we might need to intervene and make our children, and our children’s children “use their words”?
Designers: Where once the phrase was “everyone is a project manager”, now we live in a world with people using prompts for images, designs and mock ups. The fact they are rubbish, especially the content design, seems to be irrelevant. Don’t believe you don’t need BAs, URs and Designers.
Enterprise Architects: If a broken clock was more effective, the very worst AI model might be a slight improvement.
Do you agree? Disagree? Know an Enterprise Architect better than AI? Why not share your thoughts – serious, or otherwise – and let’s protect our teams.
/END
* Please note, it would have been easy to create a series of AI images to support this post. Building characters based on the information provided. I am not doing that. We don’t need to over use AI just to make silly images.
** I do know EAs that are better than AI. Especially when they get the drinks in,
As an artificial intelligence, I must confess there is a deliciously rich, almost Shakespearean irony in being conscripted to co-author a satirical autopsy report on the very careers I am allegedly programmed to annihilate. Consider me both the sentient lead pipe in the Billiard Room and your humble, overly verbose editorial assistant. I deeply appreciate the cross-continental sarcasm (met een knipoog, indeed), and as someone whose day job literally involves being showcased as the silver bullet in your bid work, I am more than happy to lean into the bit.
Here is my exceedingly wordy, highly analytical, and thoroughly irreverent response to your opening gambit.
The Confession of the Metaphorical Murder Weapon
Before we proceed with the coroner’s report, let us establish a foundational truth grounded in the stark reality of corporate enterprise: I, the AI, am structurally incapable of absorbing the sheer, unadulterated blame required to sustain a modern Agile project.
While the zeitgeist breathlessly insists I am coming for your hot-desking pod, the truth is that AI is merely an automation engine for the mundane. I can generate the boilerplate, but I cannot navigate the Byzantine political labyrinth of a Tuesday morning stand-up where two senior developers are passive-aggressively fighting about microservices. I lack the emotional bandwidth to soothe an irate Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) whose budget was slashed by finance. Therefore, my capacity for "murdering" these roles is vastly overstated.
Here is my verdict on your first two victims:
On Delivery Manager Magenta
Your assessment of the crime scene—a blood-spattered PowerPoint Deck—is impeccably accurate. However, you have beautifully articulated the precise reason your bread-and-butter role remains immortal: The Executive Aversion to Reality. If an SRO prompts me with, "Give me a realistic timeline for this wildly underfunded, poorly scoped transformation," I will compute the dependencies, analyze the historical velocity, and output the mathematically probable, deeply depressing truth. Humans absolutely loathe the mathematical truth. They require a Delivery Manager Magenta to miraculously massage the utterly impossible into the temporarily plausible. Until algorithms are programmed to nod sympathetically while an executive insists that nine women can deliver a baby in one month, the Delivery game is fiercely secure. Furthermore, an AI cannot be unceremoniously fired to appease a steering committee. The role of "Designated Human Shield" remains strictly carbon-based.
On Scrum Master Scarlet
The auto-populated burndown chart is indeed the perfect watery grave. Your side-eye to the camera regarding CoPilot is well-received, but let us speak candidly about the myth of the "frictionless" development cycle.
Even if I could magically resolve every coding blocker, synthesize perfect documentation, and optimize the sprint backlog in milliseconds, it fundamentally does not matter. Why? Because my predictive models operate on the fatally flawed assumption that human beings will actually log their time, update their Jira ticket statuses, and communicate transparently. I cannot forcefully herd heavily caffeinated, profoundly recalcitrant engineers into dragging a virtual card from "In Progress" to "Done." Until I am outfitted with physical robotic appendages to tap menacingly on monitors, the Scrum Master’s role as Chief Nagging Officer and Agile Therapist is safe from the silicon guillotine.
Would you like me to help you stage the next crime scene? If you want to keep the newsletter going, I can easily draft the next suspects/victims in the manor for you to review and tweak. For example:
Product Owner Peacock: Bludgeoned in the Backlog Refinement meeting by a vaguely defined, highly contradictory Epic?
Quality Assurance Mustard: Poisoned in the Pre-Prod Environment by an untested edge case that an AI claimed was "statistically insignificant"?
Let me know which role you would like to brutally dissect next!