AI has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue this year. It seems to have really progressed and the number of tools available like ChatGPT, CoPilot, Otter.AI etc seems to have grown.
I first used Otter.AI as part of the submission process for for my ICF-ACC examination. I found it really helpful for transcribing the coaching session accurately. The tool was able to differentiate between the coach and the coachee really well. I knew that this would be a tool that Scrum Masters would be using soon enough. How soon really surprised me!
My second brush with AI was in a group meeting where one of my colleagues gave us a running demo of ChatGPT. We were refining our prompts and decided to make up a fictitious problem and have ChatGPT create us a backlog. It did this with ease from epics, features down to User Stories complete with Acceptance Criteria. We then asked the tool to export this into a format that we could upload to Jira. The export was done with no issues. This peaked my interest and I had to find out more.
I recently took the AI for Scrum Masters course from Scrum Alliance and found it really insightful. The course provided an in-depth look at some of the different AI tools that are available. It put them into context and showed possible uses for the Scrum Master to become more efficient in their role.
One example that really stood out for me was the use of AI in Scrum Events. Having an AI tool transcribe the event for the team means that there isn’t an over reliance on everyone taking notes and distributing them. Using a tool, such as ChatGPT, the Scrum Master can craft some prompts to extract key actions or events to distribute to the team. It sounded great but I didn’t see this being utilized in our organization any time soon.
Imagine my delight today when one Scrum Master demonstrated this exact scenario and showcased the time saved using AI. He used Zoom to transcribe one planning session. He uploaded this to CoPilot and asked the tool to pick out the action points and key insights. He then asked CoPilot to create an email outlining all of the actions and key insights. He then copied and pasted the output into an email and sent it to the team. This saved 20 minutes on the email alone!
There are some great use cases contained within the Scrum Alliance training and it is well worth looking at. I hope to begin experimenting with AI in a workplace setting soon with the view of evolving with the times and supporting our Scrum Masters and Product Owners embrace this new way of working.
Can it replace the Coach or Scrum Master? I would say no. It is a great too for supporting these roles but the benefit comes from the person who is able to take these outputs, interpret them and then tailor the outputs for the context or situation that the team is working on empathetically.
Daily Scrum 