Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

AI is already changing how we work—and how we work together. In this episode, Dr. Michael Housman joins Brian Milner to explore how AI is reshaping team collaboration, decision-making, and the very structure of Agile teams.

Overview

We keep talking about AI like it’s something that’s coming. But as Dr. Michael Housman points out, it’s already here—embedded in our tools, shaping how we collaborate, and quietly shifting the makeup of our teams.

In this episode, Brian sits down with Dr. Housman, CTO, keynote speaker, and author of the upcoming Future Proof: Transform Your Business with AI or Get Left Behind, to talk about what AI is already doing in Agile environments. From how it’s helping Scrum Masters level up decision-making to how it might literally join your org chart, they dig into what’s helpful, what’s hype, and what leaders need to pay attention to right now.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Dr. Michael Housman
#82: The Intersection of AI and Agile with Emilia Breton
#99: AI & Agile Learning with Hunter Hillegas
#151: What AI Is Really Delivering (and What It’s Not) with Evan Leybourn & Christopher Morales
#165: Can Your Product Process Keep Up With AI with Cort Sharp
Agile Skills Library use code PODCASTSKILLS for $10 off
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Dr. Michael Housman is the author of Future Proof: Transform Your Business with AI (or Get Left Behind) and the founder and CEO of AI-ccelerator where he helps organizations leverage advances in artificial intelligence. He is a seasoned technologist with over 15 years of experience architecting AI platforms in sectors ranging from hiring and fraud detection to customer communication and real estate lending. His research has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and profiled by such media outlets as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Atlantic. Dr. Housman received his A.M. and Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Managerial Science from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his A.B. from Harvard University.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00)
Welcome back Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as always, Brian Milner, but today I have a very special guest with me. have Dr. Michael Hausman with us. Welcome in, Michael.

Dr. Michael Housman (00:00)
do it. Hey, thanks, Brian.

Brian Milner (00:13)
Really, really excited to have Michael here with us. Michael's got a new book coming out December of this year. It's December, right? Yeah. December, if you're listening to this of an older episode, but if you're listening to this as we release it, December, 2025, it's a book called Future Proof, Transform Your Business With AI. And then in parentheses it says, get left behind. And I love that. I love that little part of it. Michael's an author. He's a keynote speaker.

Dr. Michael Housman (00:19)
Yep, yep, exactly.

Brian Milner (00:38)
He has his own consulting company called AICelerator that he's the founder and CEO of. But more importantly, Michael has been a CTO many times over in multiple organizations. So he's been around software development. He's been in the trenches here and brings a unique perspective on that when we have this topic of AI. What we thought we'd talk about with Michael is really thinking about how AI is going to change

how we collaborate, how we actually work together. So let me open with that broad kind of question for you, Michael. Are we at a point, do you think, already where AI is really fundamentally changing how we collaborate in teams?

Dr. Michael Housman (01:23)
Yeah, I think there's no question. And of course, you know, we have folks, I think, chat GPT was the starter pistol. That was when you put a AI application front and center in something that's consumer or employee facing. And that's great. But a point that I make in the book is people don't realize that we have been baking AI into software platforms for years, right? There's a ton of you're working with a Trello or a Monday or a Jira or a Confluence.

There's a ton of AI behind the scenes that's working hard to make your job better, easier, right? And to help you be more efficient. So no question already it is transforming the way we collaborate. And you'll notice small features. I think we're at a very early stage in this evolution of project management where

It helps. It's almost like level one where it just helps with very simple pieces of automating administrative tasks, right? Building out tickets, taking notes, sending out the notes afterwards. You know, this is the table space. This is a very basic stuff that project managers are doing. And we can talk more about this, but I think it's headed towards a level two of like generating insight, making predictions when our deadline is going to slip, right? When are, when do we need to refactor mid sprint? What's going on?

And so I think that's where, and I think eventually it's going to get to the point where it's doing active adaptation, where you don't even need a project manager to be doing a lot of those adjustments. So that's probably more than, than you needed in response to your question. But you know, the point is like, folks are like, is AI gonna make its way into the scene and help our lives? And I'm like, it has been four years. Like you just don't even realize it.

Brian Milner (02:53)
No.

No, I agree. I

think you're right. Because it's been kind of this incremental growth, right? mean, even like recommendation engines and things that we kind of came to accept in like Spotify or Netflix or whatever, mean, early forms of that kind of machine recommendations, kind of machine learning behind that as well. So, I think kind of the million dollar question, especially for people in software development and

Dr. Michael Housman (03:16)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (03:30)
project management or Scrum Masters is, where is the line? Where is the thing that AI does well and where does it kind of slip over into? This is kind of the area where humans and human judgment is still kind of prevalent and needed.

Dr. Michael Housman (03:46)
Yeah, so I make this case in the book. I think there are two things that these tools are really good at doing for us. Number one is enhancing productivity and efficiency. So if there are things that a project manager, for example, or a scrum master are doing over and over and over again, like sending out an agenda, taking notes, sending it out to all the participants, checking for status updates. Like, I don't think anyone enjoys doing that. And the truth is,

Brian Milner (04:11)
Ha ha.

Dr. Michael Housman (04:12). AI can make those things much easier, better, faster. So it's offloading those responsibilities. I know that can be scary. hear the word offloading and people think, God, I'm going to get replaced. It's not at that point yet. It's far from it. There's a second benefit that I think people don't realize, which is in terms of enhancing decision-making. And if you think about it, I've been in meetings where folks are assessing what's a ticket size, right? And they'll use like small, medium or large, right? T-shirt sizing.

or they'll do the Fibonacci sequencing. be like one, three, five, seven, know, stuff like that. It grows. There's a long line of research that comes from behavioral economics. And the punchline is we're really bad. Humans are really bad at making decisions. And we suffer from countless biases like loss aversion and hot hand fallacy and like me bias. I think that is true. I'd spent many years in hiring and, you know, looking at evaluating human beings, but

That is very true when it comes to evaluating kind of workloads and making decisions. I know I personally am terrible. tend to be very aggressive with those project ticket sizing. And so the point is these tools, not only are they gonna offload a lot of the repetitive administrative tasks, but I think they can really help us make better, do a better job estimating, you know, a time to complete something, you know, sizing, you know.

developing an entire scrum board, figuring out which tickets of what size go in at various sequences. And so I think that's the thing that people don't realize is they're going to help scrum masters and project managers be better at doing their jobs so that the most frustrating thing for software executives is timelines that keep shifting, right? You estimate that it's going to take a certain amount of time to get a feature out the door and it takes twice as long. And I think it's inevitable that these tools are going to be working with

project managers, scrum masters to do better estimates so that there's more visibility from the top. And we hit those deadlines more consistently. So I think those are the two big values. Everyone thinks about, it's offloading difficult work. That's true. But my job, the work with hiring, we make better decisions when we have computer software aiding those decisions.

Brian Milner (06:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, I love that as an example to help hire because, you know, in that kind of example, it can give you lots of data and help in making the decision. correct me if I'm wrong, but I would still imagine it's not the AI making the decision though, right? It's a human eventually taking, it's assisting in making the decision, but not taking over the decision process.

Dr. Michael Housman (06:37). Mm-hmm.

Absolutely, yeah. And so I think that's exactly it. Usually it's human in the loop for a long time as the system is being trained, as it gets smarter, as it gets better, as it gets more accustomed to the habits and behaviors within a given company. And I think what that frees, I think to your original question, what does that mean the human is left to do? Well, the good news is you're not asking people for status updates. You're not trying to project, God, do we have some sort of bottleneck? Now you get to collaborate.

work with stakeholders, you get to let them know what strategic decisions they need to make along the way. And it frees us up. I've been saying this, know, algorithms will do what they do very well, which is helping to kind of guide decisions. But at the end of the day, that means project managers, scrum masters, they get to do what I think they would enjoy more, which is strategic thinking, which is collaboration, which is leading the team, which, you know, things like that. And so I think it's, I know folks are afraid of.

these tools and I write about this extensively in the book. Folks I've seen have walked off the job because they said, I don't want to train my AI replacement. I think it's exciting because it lets us humans do the things that we do really well.

Brian Milner (07:54). Yeah, I love that.

Well, I kind of want to ask a question about the nature of the team itself, because that's something obviously in the Scrum world we're really concerned with is, I shouldn't say concerned. There's not like a worry about this, but it's our focus, right? ⁓ How a group of human beings work best together to produce something. And I'm kind of curious with the way AI is helping to augment and...

Dr. Michael Housman (08:07)
Yeah.

Brian Milner (08:17)
you know, accelerate the productivity of people. You know, I know there's probably a time that's coming very, very soon where the kind of makeup of our team is going to shift and change quite a bit. So I'm kind of curious what your insights are there. How do you see sort of the typical, like a software development team of, you know, a couple of programmers and testers and, you know, project manager or something. How do you...

kind of see that fundamentally shifting and changing with this advent of AI kind of augmenting what we can do, our capabilities.

Dr. Michael Housman (08:48)
Yeah, what I'll tell you a story from my delivered a keynote and a woman came up to me afterwards and she was puzzled because she has her org chart and on the org chart, she had her team and then she had two AIs on the team. And I think it's still a little symbolic, right? We're still in the very, we're not at the point where you could task an entire system of agents, warm of agents to do a full job, but

I think the company was trying to make the point. I've heard this from a lot of companies. Listen, you need to justify that when you need head count, that AI is not able to fulfill that need. over time,

we're going to see more and more org charts with AIs. And the question is, you know, and we're still learning, we're in the very first inning of this game. How do you collaborate with them? You know, how do you work with them? Will they be sitting on this team? Is it going to be, you know, an individual agent that you slack much like you would a teammate, or is it going to be a series of different tools and agents that all work together? But

Increasingly, you're going to see AI, you know, amongst your colleagues. And the other thing I'll say is we're still thinking about these things like they're tools, like a Google chat, you you search for something on Google and you still think of it as like, it's, it's, it's a, it's a tool, like a hammer Excel spreadsheet. And I tell people these, these don't function the same way those tools do. I think a more effective metaphor is think of them as a collaborator. Right. And I think it's think of it as a colleague.

There's a whole school of thought, how do get the best results out of LLMs? And there's some argument that you could threaten them. actually threaten them with physical violence, you get slightly better results out of an LLM. But I think to train your brain to think of them as collaborators, I actually think it's appropriate to say please and thank you because there's an interaction, there's a give and take. We've all now worked with an LLM and you understand it's a conversation. And so I think the point is,

Brian Milner (10:33)
you

Dr. Michael Housman (10:50)
These aren't tools. You're not going to see it like an Asana or a Trello or Confluence or Jira. You're going to start to see it as a collaborator. think org charts and team organization is going to reflect that.

Brian Milner (11:02)
Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm kind of curious, when you think about, the conversations you've had with people at your talks and just in companies and other things, have there been any recurring themes, the things that have come up as sort of like common misconceptions? What do you think the common general public doesn't understand or doesn't really get about AI in today's world?

Dr. Michael Housman (11:25)
Yeah, I think it's a couple things. Number one, I think they don't realize, folks generally don't push back when I say, hey, this is gonna be transformative. I don't think they really understand how quickly technology moves. So one thing, people learn at a very linear trajectory. So if you look at stats, for example,

Brian Milner (11:43)
Right.

Dr. Michael Housman (11:45)
How many have used an LLM occasionally? It's only, if people think it's everyone, it's not, it's actually only about a third. How many are using AI enabled tools every day? It's one-tenth of the workforce. So in contrast with technology, which moves exponentially, like Moore's law, right? The number of transistors you fit on a chip doubles every 18 months. Well, AI is doubling every seven months in terms of its capabilities, right? So that doubling means that it is...

hockey stick already it's moving very fast and we see tools coming out all the time. And I think the point is we have a lot of folks waiting on the sidelines, right? Waiting for this, you know, the tools to become more robust or maybe they're late adopters. But part of the book, as you can assume from the title is like, lean in, get your hands dirty. You can't wait on this. This is not gonna, it's not a hype thing. This is reality and it's going to transform your work. And by the way, you need to get on board with it or potentially that works gonna go to someone who knows how to use AI.

and that brings me to the second piece, which is everyone thinks it's a technology challenge and they're very focused on the technology and GPUs and you know, all that stuff. The biggest challenges organizations face is not technology. It's people in the chapter. One of the, one of the titles of the chapter is technology is easy. People are hard and it's a little bit tongue in cheek that the biggest challenge every company is going to run into is getting folks to lean. It's retraining and re-skilling yourself at a job that you've done for.

five, 10, 15 years. And there's so much fear. It's just hard to change those ingrained patterns, right? Those routines. You get used to doing something the same way. It becomes very hard to switch it. And on top of that, there's a lot of fear. I mentioned I worked for a company. We reinvented Tytlenesgro. We gave all these Tytlenesgro agents tools and said, hey, we're gonna make your job easier. And I was shocked. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen them with my own eyes.

We have people walk off the jobs and I told you, said, I'm not training my robot replacement. get what you're up to. We'll go across the street, find a company that doesn't use AI and I'm to be very happy there. So, you know, that's, that's the biggest challenge. It's not AI isn't about the techno, at least organizations using these tools. Technology won't be the hard part. It's going to be the people.

Brian Milner (13:57)
Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. People are hard. We have our own fears and, you know, that I know there's a, there's a class that I'm teaching on AI and Scrum right now where that's one of the questions I asked early on is what's your fears? How do you, know, what are your worries about this? Cause I think it's important to acknowledge that there is a kind of an emotional component to how people are kind of addressing this in today's world a little bit. ⁓ Well, I,

Dr. Michael Housman (14:15)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Brian Milner (14:24)
kind of want to swing the other way a little bit because we're talking about the ways it can assist and the way it can help. And I'm kind of curious, I'm sure you've seen this in some ways, but can you talk a little bit about maybe the ways people are misusing it? Is there a about it that's leading to kind of overuse or overreliance or misuse?

in some way that is something to be careful of and look out for.

Dr. Michael Housman (14:52)
Yeah. I mean, I see a lot of folks assuming, expecting it to come up with some magic answer, right? Kind of one shot prompting, just say, Hey, give me everything I need all at once. And what they don't realize is that it's designed to be collaborative and conversational. so often, you know, I think prompt engineering, hated that term. I thought it got very over, it got hyped up and overused. Prompt engineering seems to suggest if you put the right magic words in that box,

Brian Milner (15:04)
you

Dr. Michael Housman (15:21)
you can just copy paste what you get out of it. And I think people don't realize that it is very much a collaborative process and that you need to work with it. You need to offer guidance that you're constantly, there's a lot of feedback, right? I think the second thing is folks are doing it, they're writing, automate, help me with an email that I'm struggling with or with a report and they don't use it as a thought partner. So that's the other thing is like,

You can ask it, Hey, I do this all the time. have a difficult client. Here's a presentation that I'm to be delivering tomorrow. Be the difficult client. By the way, you have the call logs. can simulate them. Kick the, kick the crap out of this thing. Like, tell me why this is bad, but you know, give me points where I can improve it. And so I don't see folks using it as a, as a feedback tool, as a thought partner nearly enough. and I, yeah, I think those are the two key pieces where it's like, we could, you know, it's like using a.

Brian Milner (15:59)
Yeah.

Dr. Michael Housman (16:15)
having a Ferrari in your garage and you're like, this is great. I can charge my cell phone on it. You're missing the point that it's got so much more power under the hood and you're just, barely tapping. You're not really tapping its capability.

Brian Milner (16:26)
Yeah, I want to make sure people caught that because that's a really important point. And I think you're absolutely right that it's it's it can help us improve how we do things, not necessarily by just being the tool that we use to do that thing, but to help us prepare and practice for the interactions that we have on a regular basis. So if someone was listening to that, and let's just say they're an agile coach or something, and they regularly enter in and coaching conversations with people.

Can you kind of walk people through a little bit about kind of how would they go about doing that? How would they be able to take AI and practice sort of a coaching conversation, let's say prior to having it with a difficult client?

Dr. Michael Housman (17:07)
Yeah, I there are a couple of ways you could do it. Every call these days, it's very normal to record calls. very, you know, people don't push back on that very often. Every call that we have with a client or even internal calls is recorded. It's transcribed. It's put into a directory. That directory then is fed into our instance of chat GPT, but we use Gemini as well. And now you could just ask it for retrospective feedback.

You can say, Hey, here was the call we just had with the client. What I do, or you could say, you know, in the case of agile, like we just ran this, this room, right? We did this planning meeting. What went well, what could I have improved personally? You know, there's, there's without question that's, know, a no brainer, right? To get feedback and you have someone listening in, you know, I don't think checking in with your boss once a week and then having a once a year performance evaluation. If you really want to get better at your job, that's, that's not going to get you where you want.

But I've done this as well where I have real-time avatars. I'll give you another example. I've read a Letta session. It was a bank in Peru and they just sent their board out to do site visits. So they're out in Lima and they're collecting information. They're taking photos and they're transcribing videos. And we fed it all to an LLM that was actually a real-time avatar. And we named them. We gave them two new board members, virtual avatars.

that you can have a conversation with. They know everything about the bank. They also have a purview into everything that you just collected. And now they're, they literally participate in that meeting. They're giving you feedback in real time. said, Hey, what do we think about this idea? We want to think about some mobile solution for payments. One of the avatars thought it was a great idea. One said, this is silly. This is not really on our wheelhouse and there are companies that do this. know, so think about that. You could imagine a world. think we're not far from the point where

running your scrum, you have your planning meeting, and there's an AI sitting there. And that AI is weighing in, it could be giving feedback, right? It could be giving a voice to folks that don't have one, that don't feel like they can speak up. that's, know, the possibilities are endless.

Brian Milner (19:15)
Yeah, yeah, that's great. And I can endorse that personally myself. I've been using it for those reasons, those same kind of practice sessions as well. It's great for practicing talking to your customers, trying to get maybe early signs of what they might want or need for your product. There's a lot of kind of a

Dr. Michael Housman (19:30)
Yeah.

Brian Milner (19:36)
a deeper insight you can get from that prior to the actual conversation. And, you know, we're talking here about collaboration and how it's going to assist collaboration. Well, that's a very definitive way is if it can enhance the conversation, right? And have you prepared for that conversation that you get the most out of that collaboration when you actually talk with the real human.

One of the other areas we talk about in Agile when we talk about collaboration, we talk about kind of different methods of interacting with people. We talk about mentoring people and facilitating different sessions and coaching people and stuff. so I kind of want to hone in a little bit more on that collaboration aspect because it's very much about conversations. And I'm kind of curious from your perspective, how does AI...

help in that area to help us get more out of our conversations and actually when we're together, collaborate more effectively.

Dr. Michael Housman (20:32)
Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of ways. Number one, there are a few tools. know, everyone deals with conflict in the workplace, right? Inevitably, there's going to be disagreements. You want to make sure that you have a functioning team that can handle disagreement and conflict well. There are tools that are available. You can plug them into your Slack or your team instance, and they can flag conversations, even private conversations that seem to be going off the rails, right? And kind of they can flag.

negative escalatory language and potentially surface that. So you don't have a lot of sidebars, right? So I think it can be a real time coach and it can teach folks. think the tool is called MP. I looked at it once upon a time. the point is imagine that it's just kind of keeping tabs and it's making sure that folks are getting along. And if there is something that it gets surfaced very quickly, there's a tool you mentioned coaching and mentoring and practicing.

So I'll give you another example. Aramco is the biggest oil company in the world. And they brought me in because they want to promote psychological safety. And what that means is Google's done a bunch of research. The number one thing that contributes to high functioning teams is whether people can speak up, raise a hand, and say, hey, I don't feel comfortable with this. I feel like something's wrong.

That's the end. By the way, when you're doing that in oil fields or rigs, when people don't do that, there are people who die, right? That's how accidents happen. So it's literally lives are at stake. They brought me in and there's tools, you you could do, you know, you and me, Brian could do a practice session. So the point is I want to teach you psychological safety. I could say, let's have a practice scenario. You feel like there's a safety issue. You need to bring it up to me. But to do that with hundreds of thousands of employees, it scales really hard.

Brian Milner (21:51)
Yeah.

Dr. Michael Housman (22:12)
What I guided them towards is look, there are AI platforms that can pretend to be a coach or a mentor or a boss. You practice that conversation with your boss. And by the way, it's scoring on a very objective rubric. And so now I can intervene and say, hey, Brian, you didn't handle that conversation really well, right? We're gonna show you how to do it better.

Brian Milner (22:34)
Yeah.

Dr. Michael Housman (22:34)
So

in all those ways, either by monitoring real time, by practicing and helping folks get better and improve those skills, it's going to promote collaboration. It's going to allow us all to function better and be more effective. I think it's amazing to be able to scaling it with this technology. It's going to open up a whole new world of collaboration.

Brian Milner (22:56). That's awesome.

Yeah, I completely agree. I know that in this area as well though, of the kind of growing areas of concern or a little bit is around the area of kind of the ethical considerations and safety considerations for this as well. Cause we're skirting the line a little bit here, right? Cause we're talking about, you know, having AI help us in personal areas, right? It's helping me in my conversations.

Dr. Michael Housman (23:17)
Yeah.

Brian Milner (23:24)
That's a very personal thing about how I react and how I respond to people's questions. So I'm wondering from your perspective, what do you teach people around the ethical considerations and concerns they need to think about when they're using AI in this way?

Dr. Michael Housman (23:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole chapter about deploying AI responsibly and ethically. These tools often mirror our biases and that could be, there's misinformation, hallucinations, and there are ways to keep that in check, but, you know, project management agile, you can't, know, mistakes, there's very little margin for mistakes. And so that's someplace where you need to use these tools to rein that in, but like,

with bias and making bias decisions. I'll give you an example. I did hiring for a number of years. We built models based on how people performed on the job. And if you don't make adjustments, imagine if you will, there's a workplace where people who tend to get promoted are white and male, women tend to stay in the same place, and minorities tend to be shown the door. Well,

You build into you build a model based on that bias and you deploy it naively you're going to reinforce the bias that exists. And so I think the same is true of and the good news is we had safeguards in place so that we would run tests on the models, we would say hey. Is this going to create the workplace that we want, or is this going to reinforce existing biases, so the point is.

Brian Milner (24:34)
Yeah.

Dr. Michael Housman (24:49)
there need to be safeguards in place. You need to bake it into that either procurement or model building and deployment process so that there are a few inflection points that are go no go. And we're evaluating even if we can do something, even if we can do social listening, even if we can be advising around making decisions around project management, should we, right? Is that is gonna make people uncomfortable?

Brian Milner (25:11)
Yeah.

Dr. Michael Housman (25:13)
Is it actually going to lead us down the wrong path if we've trained it on data that isn't ideal, that it's somehow biased?

Brian Milner (25:15)
Hmm.

Yeah, that's a great point there. I agree with that. Well, one of the things I thought about in relation to this topic is when Agilist approach any issue, it's very often comes back to these three main strategies or approaches we talk about, trying to increase transparency, inspect and really get to the heart of what's really behind something and then

you know, figure out what the right adaptation is to make moving forward. I'm just curious from your perspective, what you've seen AI do and help organizations and their collaborating in teams. How has it, or what ways can it help us increase transparency, help us get to root causes of things faster and figure out how we should change?

Dr. Michael Housman (26:03)
Yeah. I mean, think that the transparency is a no-brainer, right? Anyone who's getting meeting notes, agenda sent out beforehand, meeting notes sent out afterwards. I think it's inevitable that these tools are going to make much more information available, right? You can now search your Chai GPT or Gemini instance and it can go to all your...

Wiki, can go to all, you know, Asana. I think they're starting to get access to GitHub. So imagine, if you will, a giant brain layered on top of all these SaaS applications. And so it's basically showcasing where are we, you the question that folks are asking, where are we in this sprint? What's going to get done? What are, what's on track? What's falling behind? I think that's already in the works. We're already seeing more transparency because of these tools. For me, the inspect stuff is what's really exciting.

Right? So right now, how do you figure out where are the root causes of problems? You have to do a lot of digging. It's a lot of forensics, right? And you're asking different people and you're kind of as a scrum as you're forming a mental model and trying to figure out it's like doing a detective novel, right? Well,

Brian Milner (27:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Michael Housman (27:12)
I think very quickly we're going to see the tools get smart enough and integrated with enough platforms that they can do that root cause analysis that they could say, okay, we're slipping. And here's the reason why, right? We're finding a bottleneck. Some developer is really struggling on something that we thought was going to be a lot easier.

And so I think the inspection, imagine if you will, now you can query and work with an AI and say, just, it's just start typing in. You don't have to talk to people. You can actually just say, okay, what, what metrics are you sawing? Did you see slipping? Like, what do you think is the root cause of this issue? and then I think that speaks to the more forward looking piece, which is okay. Now that we're getting smarter, we understand what's happening. What are the patterns that are causing deadlines to slip? can we be better about estimating?

Right? Can we avoid the t-shirt sizing and can we actually use data to make better decisions to give stakeholders more visibility, you know, just get more accurate. Cause I've just, I've always, I've been in so many companies where we get really ambitious during that planning meeting at the outset, right? We're kicking off a sprint. And then how many times do you come back two weeks later and you're like, yeah, we've been off way more than we can chew. And it's infuriating to company stakeholders and leadership. And I would love to see us narrow that gap.

Brian Milner (28:15)
Right.

Dr. Michael Housman (28:25)
So we know with a high level of precision, what can we bite off and present them to trade-offs? A lot of times they just have to make decisions. What's valuable? What's most important? So I think all of those pieces are gonna, AI is gonna speak to all of them, but the first one, transparency, we're well on the way there.

Brian Milner (28:26)
Yeah.

This is all really fascinating. want to kind of wrap it up with a question here for you, because people are listening to this and they are starting to get excited about it. Maybe they're part of that percentage of the population that's not really using it yet at work or hasn't really dove into this very much. If you were to give them advice for a safe place, what's one thing they could do to start to start to

integrate this and start to explore this a little bit more, where would you point them?

Dr. Michael Housman (29:10)
I mean, I think all the big LLMs of like, Clodge, Gemini, ChachiPT, everyone should be in those tools, should be playing around with them, should be kicking the tires on their capabilities. What's amazing to me is they're starting to build a memory. So if you have a history in any of these tools, do yourself a favor, ask it, what are my blind spots? And you'll be blown away. This thing knows me better than my dad. And it was amazing, it was unbelievable, and it really called out.

Brian Milner (29:29)
Yeah.

Dr. Michael Housman (29:38)
things that I'm good at and things where I really struggle. And so when you start, that's to me, that's starting to have a conversation that's learning, that's getting feedback that you start to appreciate how smart these tools are, right? From that memory. And I think beyond that, playing around with different tools, there are tools coming out all the time and starting that there's one, I'll kind of leave you with this one, which is.

when McKinsey did a big study and they said, okay, you know, what makes you a power user of AI? And there were a few things that questions that folks asked, you know, but the number one was before they started a task, they asked themselves, is this something AI could help me with? And so I think that hitting that pause, right, rather than just jumping in, be like, I got to write a job description for a new role, or I got to do this, I got to write a report for my boss, just stop and say, okay.

Is there some way like it's okay to be lazy? It's actually, it's a good thing, right? Let's just stop say, Hey, is there a lazy ways, lazy man's way to do this using AI and starting to asking that question at the beginning of any given task? I think that's, that's a key unlock.

Brian Milner (30:30)
haha

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I can't wait for the book. It sounds really, really fascinating. So again, just if you missed that earlier on, it's called Future Proof, Transform Your Business with AI or Get Left Behind. And Michael Hausman here is the author. It's coming out in December, 2025. well, Michael, congratulations on the book and thank you for coming on. It sounds like it's going to be really fascinating.

Dr. Michael Housman (31:07)
Yeah, I'm super excited. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.