#166: AI Isn’t Coming for Your Job, But It Is Joining Your Team with Dr. Michael Housman

By: Brian Milner

November 12,2025

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

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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 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, 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.

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