In my 2 decades of IT career, I've seen how trends come and go. The latest to cause a stir is the fear that Artificial Intelligence will make many jobs obsolete, including that of the Scrum Master. Being a Scrum Master are you also worried about AI taking away your job? The answer is not a straight forward ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The answer is however - ‘it depends’.
It Depends.
It depends on what you actually do as a Scrum Master. It depends on what is your core focus area as a Scrum Master. It depends on what you have done over the last couple of years as a Scrum Master to be a true leader for your Scrum team.
If in your role as a Scrum Master if you have been:
- Creating jira tickets for the Scrum team
- Moving the jira tickets from one column to another during daily standup
- Sending a summary/MoM of the event at end of every Scrum event or a team meeting
- Creating and maintaining dashboards with different reports like burndowns or velocity trends
- The SPOC/Mouthpiece for the Scrum Team
Then you should definitely worry but NOT as Scrum Master because you were never a Scrum Master. At best you were a Scrum secretary. And that job is lost to AI for sure.
However, if as Scrum Master you have been:
- Elemental in improving the abilities of the Scrum Team
- Making the Scrum Team more self-managing, so much so that they don’t need you anymore
- Helping them resolve their internal conflicts in a professional way.
- Instrumental in creating an environment that provides psychological safety
- True Leader who empowered the team
Then there is no need to worry. You have successfully broken the barrier between title and what it means to be a True Leader. And as a True Leader, your skills are always needed irrespective of your title.
The Myth - AI will take away Scrum Master job
Let's be clear: this notion is a fundamental misunderstanding of both current AI capabilities and the understanding of the accountability of a Scrum Master.
Most of the AI that we are surrounded with and that has been hyped, falls in a category called the Artificial Narrow Intelligence. The AI gurus who are deep into the AI world term it as ‘weak AI’.
These AI models/tools like chatGPT, perplexity, copilot or the likes are definitely powerful tools but within a specific context or on the data that they are trained with. They may be able to scour the internet at an unimaginable speed, analyze text or data and even write code; but that’s it. These models lack the very basis of human interactions - empathy and rationality (though I may agree that not all humans are rational, 😛).
An AI program that can fathom the various flaws of human intelligence, the unpredictable and at times irrational behaviour of humans is still a distant future. To the best of my knowledge, we do not have such datasets that can train AI to be empathetic, rational or understand the nuances of human interactions.
On the other hand, the Scrum Master's job is to deal with the eccentricities of humans. It is neither easy to replicate nor is repetitive in nature. Take for example, a Scrum Master is required to enable a team to High Performance. Is there a template that can be followed every time and we will have a high performing team? The answer is NO. Every team’s journey to high performance is different.
A Scrum Master’s is also supposed to:
- Coach and Mentor: Guiding a team through conflicts, fostering self-management, and helping individuals grow. This requires the Scrum Master to be unbiased, self-aware and emotionally intelligent.
- Facilitate Complex Interactions: Creating boundaries for self-management is another important aspect of the Scrum Master’s job. These boundaries need to be subtle yet effective for the team to navigate their interpersonal dynamics and deliver results.
- Remove Impediment: These impediments are not your usual run-of-the-mill technical challenges. The team is self sufficient to handle those. A Scrum Master has to address impediments that are beyond the team such as low team morale, organizational politics, or a lack of psychological safety.
IMHO, there is no AI model/tool that can do any of the aforementioned tasks at this point in time.
All the content creators that feed the social media algorithms with titles like ‘agile is dead’, ‘no need of scrum masters’ and others, are often either misinformed about the core tenets of Scrum or have a shallow understanding of what a Scrum Master actually does. They confuse the repetitive, administrative tasks that can be automated with the profound, human-centric work that defines the role.
Conclusion:
While AI can certainly be a powerful tool for a Scrum Master, helping with things like data analysis or creating summaries, it will never be a substitute, not in the near future or as long as humans are still creating products. A Scrum Master true to its accountability doesn’t have to fear the algorithm driven job scarcity. Remember that a Scrum Master’s work is fundamentally human centric, built on leadership, empathy, and the unique ability to navigate the complex world of people and their interactions. As long as you stay true to this identity it doesn't matter whether your title/designation is Scrum Master or something else in the ever changing world.