AI ate Agile for Breakfast

A decade after stepping back from the Lean Agile Scrum (LAS) community, I wanted to speak up again with a bold thesis: AI eats Agile for Breakfast. The talk was meant as a wake-up call for the community I’ve helped shape since 2008. The conference was cancelled. Three weeks later I’m giving the opening keynote somewhere else – plus a workshop. Even the cancellation proved the thesis.

2008–2018: building Lean, Agile & Scrum in Switzerland

When I joined the swissICT group in 2008, it was still called Scrum Breakfast. Back then, nobody knew what to make of the rugby analogy – Backlog, Sprint, Retrospective were brand new words. What we achieved in those first ten years still fills me with pride: today, Backlog items, Sprints and Product Owners are simply taken for granted on every project. Agile has become the de facto standard in software development. Back then, the revolutionary part was talking about mindset, skillset, toolset. What’s left of the Agile Manifesto today is, sadly, just big business: Scrum.org counts 1.18 million certifications, Scrum Alliance pulls in roughly $20 million a year from them, and SAFe sells its “Licence to be Agile” as a $295-per-head annual subscription. Fun fact: no study has ever proven the value of a certificate, except to whoever issues it. A movement turned into a business model.

The talk

AI eats Agile for Breakfast – a talk about the pace of AI-native software engineering. The thesis: the pace is so high that even agile has become too rigid – too much process, too little time. The real bottleneck isn’t capacity, it’s capability – and the answer is to scale down, not up. Submitted May 17, accepted, and published in the LAS programme.

LAS 2026 – cancelled

In early August came the official notice: “Unfortunately, we had to cancel this year’s edition of the LAS conference. We thank everyone interested for their understanding, and we look forward to welcoming you at another swissICT event.” No talk, no stage. But the thesis held – and three weeks later it got a stage after all.

Opening keynote at Securiton’s «E-Summit»

Jörg Furrer, Head of Development at Securiton AG, saw the LAS Conference program. He reached out directly and spontaneously, and we had a genuinely good conversation. He decided fast: opening keynote, 60 minutes, at Securiton’s internal E-Summit on September 8 in Zollikofen. The unexpected twist: an AI-native Mob Programming workshop, on top of the talk. Not just listening – actually building, hands-on. An engineering organisation that invests in skill rather than headcount.

Punchline

For twenty years I made organisations “agile” – the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), Swiss public broadcasting (SRF), GNSS chip development at u-blox. It was exactly right for its time. With AI, it’s simply too slow today. AI eats Agile for Breakfast is not a promise – it’s the record. Even the talk’s own cancellation proved the thesis.

If you’re interested in a talk on AI-native software engineering, I’d love to hear from you – I always enjoy meeting interesting people.