Traditional Scrum Versus AI Scrum
AI Scrum will be familiar to those that are used to Scrum, Kanban, or even Scrumban. Those coming from other project management approaches such as Waterfall will have no problem adapting to this AI-augmented framework.
March 21, 2026 • James Baker
Most teams don't fail at AI because of the technology. They fail because they kept using Scrum exactly as it was designed, before AI existed. As an organization, they chose to continue doing the same things but with a new frame work. Worse still, they add the new frame work but pick and choose what parts they want to implement or do regularly which defeats the purpose.
AI Scrum isn't a trend. It's a necessary evolution. Here's what changes, and why it matters for your team.
Generally speaking, the main bottleneck of a project such as web development, marketing campaign, or software creation is creativity of solving the problem. But what if you provided your rough, nebulous ideas to Claude, a large language model (LLM) and in a matter of minutes you’re presented at least one possible solution.
The solution is a great start, 60% of the way to something you could deliver to your stakeholder. Something that would have take hours or days to be created solely by a human has been augmented by AI. But, you’re not finished! Over the next 30 to 45 minutes you iterate through changes until you’re 90% of the way complete. Your solution is solid. AI augmentation in a “team in a box” that can work faster than you’ve ever worked before. The stakeholders can now have a choice of what your team provides instead of taking whatever is given to them, even as all of the choices meet the acceptance criteria.
Now, if you can create one solution in an hour, could you create two more before lunch? Yes! So in the matter of four hours, you have three solutions to present to your stakeholders but wait, things need to be validated and go through governance to ensure that there are not undiscovered holes that could create undue risk.
If a normal solution would take quality assurance several hours to evaluate and run many test cases against, with each solution your group creates even more work for those downstream. Before you know it, validation is holding up progress. The process has become inverted.
AI Scrum: The Agile Inversion helps your group plan out a logical process and prepares your team to think about how Scrum works differently. Any discipline using or wanting to use Scrum as their project management framework to deliver iteratively to their stakeholders can methodically evaluate their current state and then work through the portions of the book that relate to their team. It’s not an all or nothing approach!