A practical guide on what essential AI qualities define next-gen Scrum Masters.
Let's get started with understanding who a Scrum Master is.
If we wanted to compare a Scrum Team with another team in other sectors, we could talk about a music orchestra.
Music Composer is the Product Owner
Musicians are the Developers
Orchestra Conductor is the Scrum Master
Scrum Master is the Product Development Orchestra Conductor
Your focus point is on How Well,
as you are accountable for the Scrum Team Effectiveness.
You can find two variants of Scrum in the market:
Superficial Scrum
Professional Scrum
Their differences are shown in this picture, where Professional Scrum includes the elements under the water as well.
The first takeaway is:
Don’t see AI as another tool, but a new colleague.
It can seriously help you move toward the Professional Scrum.
AI Literacy for Scrum Masters has two categories:
1- AI Fundamentals
2- AI for Scrum Mastery
AI Fundamentals
1.1. Basics of AI
You should know about:
- History of AI
- Main categories of AI: ANI, Generative AI, …
- How Generative AI systems are built
- Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Network, …
- How AI Models are trained
- How AI Models are trained; Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning, …
- LLM, Diffusion Models, …
- How the cost of AI is calculated; Tokenization
- ...
2.1. How to communicate with AI
You should know about:
- What a prompt is
- Prompt Engineering
- Structured models for writing effective prompts
- Create a reusable library of dynamic prompts for the Scrum Team
- Techniques like few-shot prompting, Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT),…
…
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3.1. Ethical & Responsible AI + Security
You should know about:
- Transparency & Explainability
- Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
- Accountability & Responsibility
- Fairness, Non-Discrimination (Bias mitigation)
- Inclusiveness, Sustainable Development, and Well-being
- Environmental Impact
- Safety, Robustness, and Reliability
- Human Oversight & Control
- ...
4.1. AI Laws and Regulatory Approaches
You should know about:
- EU AI Act
- UNESCO Recommendation on AI Ethics
- ...
5.1. AI Fluency Framework
An AI-aware Scrum Master leverages AI within the boundary of the 4D AI fluency framework to ensure their interactions with AI are effective, efficient, ethical and safe.
1- Delegation
Setting goals and deciding whether, when and how to engage with Al.
2- Description
Effectively describing goals to prompt useful Al behaviors and outputs.
3- Discernment
Accurately assessing the usefulness of Al outputs and behaviours.
4- Diligence
Taking responsibility for what we do with AI and how we do it.
AI for Scrum Mastery
How to find and decide on AI tools
Fal.ai
A marketplace of AI models without subscription, but pay as you go.
AI Tools for Various Scrum Master Use Cases
This is a complete list of AI Tools for various use cases
Teaching Scrum Topics
You should know how to leverage AI to use for your Teaching stance as a Scrum Master. Watch this video that I created with AI to introduce Scrum:
Enhancing Scrum Events with AI
AI-enhanced Daily Scrum
How effective is your Daily Scrum?!
As a quick reminder ...
Daily Scrum is
- A formal opportunity for in-time inspection & adaptation
- Just for Developers (to get aligned)
- Inspecting the progress toward the Sprint Goal
- Creating an actionable plan for the next day
- Identifying impediments
- 15-minute timebox
Daily Scrum is NOT
- A status meeting
- A problem-solving meeting
- For the Product Owner and Scrum Master
- Mandatory for Developers to stand up
Daily Scrum is an alignment session to increase the likelihood of achieving the Sprint Goal.
Without a Sprint Goal, the Daily Scrum is pointless.
Here is how to use AI to create a Sprint Goal.
Copy this prompt, paste it into an AI system like ChatGPT, fill in the brackets with the specific data of your product, and use the result as the draft version of your Sprint Goal:
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We use [Sprint duration like two-week] Sprints to build [Your Product]. The Product Vision is to [Your Product Vision]. We use [Product Goal duration like quarterly] Product Goals as the mid-term goals. The current Product Goal is to [Your current Product Goal]. This is the [Sprint number like first] Sprint of the current Product Goal. So, break down the current Product Goal into smaller short-term goals and use them as the base to create a Sprint Goal for the [Sprint number] Sprint aligned with the Product Vision and the current Product Goal through the FOCUS model as follows:
Fun: come up with a memorable title and try to inject an element of fun.
Outcome-oriented: The goal should achieve a common understanding of what you are trying to accomplish.
Collaborative: The whole Scrum Team creates the Sprint Goal together.
Ultimate: The Sprint Goal should include a why, the ultimate reason behind what we are trying to achieve.
Singular: The Sprint Goal should consist of a single common objective instead of multiple competing objectives.
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AI enhances your Daily Scrum in 3 stages
1- Before Daily Scrum
Use AI to analyze your task management tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, etc. + your team communication tools like Slack, MS Teams, etc. to create your desired insights of the previous day, giving you input for today’s Daily Scrum, including:
- Stories stuck too long
- Work-in-progress violations
- Unplanned work (bugs, urgent requests, …)
- Any blocker
- Team sentiment
- The likelihood of achieving the Sprint Goal
- …
Result: The team walks into the Daily Scrum already aware of where inspection is needed, saving time and making it more effective.
To prepare the team for the AI-enhanced Daily Scrums, you need to setup three things:
1.1. Create a channel/group to add and collect the generated insights (e.g., Slack channel, MS Teams group, …)
1.2. Create an AI Agent to communicate with your task management tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, …)
Schedule to run your AI Agent 10 minutes before the Daily Scrum each day to identify all changes over the past day, generate required insights, and add them to the Daily Scrum channel.
*** You can use Make.com, n8n, Zapier, etc. to create your AI Agents. My recommendation is Make.com, which is simple and user-friendly.
1.3. Create an AI Agent to connect with your communication tools (Slack, MS Teams, …)
Schedule to run your AI Agent 10 minutes before the Daily Scrum each day to go through all the conversations over the past day, generate required insights, and add them to the Daily Scrum channel.
2- During Daily Scrum
Make AI your Meeting Intelligent Assistant. To do so, use an AI meeting note-taker. The following tools are good options: Fireflies.ai, Otter.ai, Tactiq.io
(They are easily integrated with your communication tools like MS Teams, Zoom, …)
They silently work in the background to take notes of the Daily Scrum.
Use two screens in your Daily Scrum as follows:
*** On the AI Help screen, you can access all AI inputs, including the Daily Scrum channel for AI-generated insights, in-meeting AI-generated alerts and flags, and more.
Daily Scrum happens in two parallel lines.
Line 1: Team
1- The team checks the insights of the past day generated just before the meeting by AI.
2- The team starts the conversation around inspecting the progress toward the Sprint Goal.
3- The team makes an actionable plan for today to maximize the likelihood of achieving the Sprint Goal.
4- The team shares the blockers and impediments and defines how it wants to deal with them.
Line 2: AI Assistant
Your AI assistant helps you by giving in-time alerts:
- Alert the team to return to the Sprint Goal
- Flag when the team drifts into problem-solving
- Flag repeated blockers
- Gently alert when someone exceeds their time
- Alert when the event timebox is over
Your conversations in the Daily Scrum should shift from activity reporting to Sprint Goal-oriented inspection.
3- After Daily Scrum
Setup your AI meeting note-taker and AI Agents to do the following things:
A- Create a summary of the Daily Scrum
B- List the blockers and how the team wants to deal with them
C- List the decisions for the day made in the Daily Scrum
D- Informing the Scrum Master about the impediments
E- Set separate meetings to solve announced problems and invite team members (for this item, you need to setup an AI Agent)
Sprint-level AI Insights
Scrum Masters can leverage the following Sprint-level AI-generated insights for the Sprint Retrospectives, private coaching conversations, and adjusting team agreements:
- Recurring blockers and impediments
- Stories that frequently spill over from one Sprint to the next Sprint
- Daily Scrums drifting into status meetings
- Daily Scrums drifting into problem-solving
- Stories repeatedly announced as “almost done”
- Same people always reporting blockers
- Who speaks most/least
- Whether updates are task-based vs. goal-based
- The positivity level of the Daily Scrums
- Adherence to the event timebox
Definition of a “Good” AI‑enhanced Daily Scrum
- Sprint Goal is the center of conversation
- Produces a clear, actionable plan for today
- Insights are generated and used
- Team members get in-time alerts
- Blockers are visible
- Is positive, productive, and ends early or on time
- Team leaves knowing exactly what to do next
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AI Impacts on the Definition of Done
AI Orchestrator
An AI-aware Scrum Master knows how to incorporate AI capabilities into the team’s Scrum way of working. It includes finding, devising, and setting AI tools that can grow their process to a new level of Value Delivery.
This new stance is called AI Orchestrator.
It usually happens by leveraging AI Agents.
Keeping Transparency High
You should be able to create reports with a professional look and feel to transfer messages and keep the transparency high.
You can create this type of report by prompts or by giving a PowerPoint file as an input, …
Click here to see the full report.
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The Next Step
If you want to invest in becoming an AI-aware Scrum Master, attend my upcoming full Professional Scrum Master – AI Essentials class. Click here to get more information about the class.