The excitement around AI in software development is everywhere. Every week, new tools promise to boost productivity, accelerate delivery, and raise the quality bar. Yet in many organisations, the impact of AI has been underwhelming. Not because the technology isn’t powerful, but because old habits, entrenched bureaucracy, and ritualised ways of work are quietly holding teams back.
Let’s unpack this.
Old Habits Result in Retrofitting Instead of Rethinking
Software delivery teams are creatures of habit. Developers, testers, analysts, and product owners have refined their methods over years, influenced by the prevailing wisdom of waterfall and agile. These practices have become a gospel called “the way things are done.”
Now, with AI entering the scene, teams are trying to bolt it onto existing workflows rather than rethinking how software should be delivered in a world that is embedded with AI. The result is a fragmented adoption approach: each capability - QA, Dev and Ops teams - experiment in isolation, often duplicating effort and missing synergy.
A blueberry muffin analogy helps illustrate this. You can either bake a vanilla muffin and poke blueberries in afterward, or you can mix the berries into the batter before baking. Most organisations treat AI like the first method, an afterthought, sprinkled on top. True transformation requires the baking of AI into the batter itself, weaving it into the lifecycle so that every role and process benefits from its potential.
Corporate Bureaucracy: Hierarchies at Odds with AI Speed
Beyond habits, structures slow things down.
Traditional hierarchies position decision-makers at the top, dipping in as and when milestones or approvals are required. The people doing the work often have little say in what to prioritise or how to execute.
This model worked when delivery cycles spanned months. But AI thrives in environments where ideas, experiments, and adjustments happen in hours, not weeks. Prompting, prototyping, and iterating require decisions close to the ground and teams with greater autonomy. At the same time, alignment is crucial, without shared context across roles, AI adoption risks becoming chaos.
The paradox is that AI requires both speed and cohesion. Teams cannot achieve AI’s pace if every decision must climb a chain of command, nor can they thrive if every individual runs ahead with their own AI toolset without a unifying framework.
When Ways-of-Work Become Rituals
Agile was born as a response to rigidity. It emphasised adaptability, collaboration, and delivering value faster. But for many teams today, agile has ossified into a set of ceremonies where the ritual overshadows the purpose.
Instead of focusing on outcomes, teams often measure success by how faithful they are to the process. The stand-up becomes a status update, sprint planning a negotiation of scope, retrospectives a box to tick. Value delivery quietly takes a back seat.
When AI enters this picture, the mismatch becomes obvious. A tool that can generate working code or automate test suites in minutes doesn’t neatly fit into a sprint cycle designed for slower increments. Yet many teams continue to force-fit AI into rituals instead of asking if those rituals still serve them.
The promise of AI is to collapse cycles of work into shorter bursts of value creation. But that can only happen if teams return to agile’s essence: value over process, outcomes over outputs.
A Blindspot Worth Noticing
None of this is to say that habits, structures, or methodologies are inherently bad. In fact, they provide the necessary guardrails for collaboration and delivery at scale. But when the pursuit of AI productivity becomes the goal, the very same guardrails can turn into blindspots.
Leaders and teams may assume they’re “doing AI” because tools have been added into old ways of working, while missing the deeper opportunity: to reimagine how software is conceived, built, and delivered when AI is part of the batter, not sprinkled on top.
The golden egg of AI-driven productivity won’t be found by clinging to yesterday’s playbook. It requires the questioning of assumptions, loosening of rituals, and flattening of structures so that teams can unlock the real value waiting on the table.