There's a long-running theme that drives success in software delivery, but as an industry we keep forgetting it. There's a combination of culture and technical practices you need to deliver good software, but those willing to do the ground work to be successful are the minority.
We saw this play out when Extreme Programming (culture + technical practices) was swept aside by Scrum (process). When you're told that Scrum is equivalent to Extreme Programming (they are both "Agile Methods") but Scrum requires practically little effort and no real change, many folks opt for the "blue pill".
The folks with the culture + technical practices foundation are more successful with new technology. That's partly due to the foundations themselves, but also because they are the people who are receptive to change and the hard work involved.
So, back to AI. These strong-foundations teams (or high-performers as we call them in the research) have psychological safety, are working in small batches, and are using the feedback loops to course-correct continuously. They are still doing the tough work (the thinking), but not necessarily the toil work (mashing at a keyboard).
I'll finish on a concrete example. Strong-foundations teams already surfed the automation wave. As captured in the ideas of Continuous Delivery, they have looked at everything needed to get a change from the developer's machine all the way to production and they've automated it. These deployment pipelines make it safe and easy to flow changes and they make it easier to work in small steps.
Add AI into this picture and this pipeline needs little adjustment to flow changes either at an increased rate of throughput, or maybe just the same rate, but solving problems that are heavier lift and more valuable. The pipeline is validating those changes and providing the now vital deployment governance.
The teams that haven't been creating and improving this deployment pipeline will be in a lot of trouble. It's not a matter of "if it's going to get into a mess", only "when they finally notice the mess".
