TL; DR: AI Creates Jobs? — Food for Agile Thought #552
Welcome to the 552nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,468 peers. This week, Ramp Economics Lab and Revelio Labs report that heavy AI adopters grew headcount by 10%, yet Charity Majors insists only honest feedback loops turn adoption into results. Alex Karp questions the economics entirely, calling token pricing fundamentally broken. Pavel Samsonov and Jerry Colonna both argue that speed without trust or judgment produces waste, while Janna Bastow reminds us that roadmap dates are comfort objects that mask the need for outcomes.
Next, Jeff Gothelf proposes that when AI makes building nearly free, teams should prioritize learning value and reversibility over effort. Kyle Poyar believes the resulting cost crisis is self-inflicted and offers a five-step spending fix. Yanli Liu warns that even working tools like Claude Skills silently rot without maintenance, while Addy Osmani suggests engineers must own accountability as agents handle execution. Also, John Cutler recommends that overthinkers disconnect self-worth from work entirely.
Lastly, Paweł Huryn frames the 2026 AI PM roadmap around whether agents run on your work or inside your product, while Alberto Romero raises a stranger question: why do AI models keep inventing their own languages? Fabian Metzeler and McKinsey colleagues distill seven truths from 15 AI-native companies, yet Cris Beswick warns most transformations stall when organizations skip differentiated innovation. Finally, Ant Murphy proposes a two-question test to tell actionable metrics from noise.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: AI Creates Jobs?
(via Ramp Builders): A New Look at AI’s Impact on Jobs
Ramp Economics Lab and Revelio Labs tracked AI vendor spending against workforce records across 21,599 U.S. firms. They found that heavy adopters grew headcount by 10% over two years, with entry-level roles up 12%. Low-intensity adopters saw no significant change. The authors caution that gains mostly concentrate in tech-forward sectors.
🎯 Product
(via ProdPad): Executive anxiety: Roadmaps as Security Blankets
Janna Bastow suggests that executives demanding roadmap dates are seeking confidence, not schedules. Dates act as comfort objects that transfer risk to product teams without reducing it. Show outcomes instead.
: Trust is not built on craft alone
Pavel Samsonov proposes that no tool, including AI, can substitute for organizational trust. Product teams racing to ship faster without the rigor to back it up are producing waste, not outcomes.
: How to prioritize your backlog when effort is no longer the constraint
Jeff Gothelf proposes that when AI makes building nearly free, effort-based prioritization breaks. Instead, replace it with two questions: what will this teach us, and how easily can we undo it?
: The Ultimate AI PM Learning Roadmap 2026
Paweł Huryn structures the 2026 AI PM roadmap around one question: Does the agent run on your work or inside your product? You need both, and one builds the other.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via O’Reilly Media): AI Enthusiasts Are in a Race Against Time, AI Skeptics Are in a Race Against Entropy
Charity Majors suggests AI enthusiasts and skeptics both face real threats but lack shared feedback loops: Tell the whole story, wins and costs, and treat adoption as an engineering problem.
: The AI cost crisis is entirely self-inflicted (and Fable 5 just made it worse)
Kyle Poyar believes the AI cost crisis is self-inflicted, driven by FOMO-fueled adoption without spending discipline, and offers a five-step framework for managing runaway token bills without killing AI adoption.
(via CNBC): 📺 Palantir's Karp bashes OpenAI, Anthropic token model: 'Something has gone completely wrong'
Alex Karp calls OpenAI and Anthropic's token pricing fundamentally broken, suggesting enterprises burn cash on tokens that create no value while handing their IP to the labs. He pushes open-weight models as the alternative.
(via Medium): A Bad Claude Skill Is Worse Than No Skill. Here’s the Rubric.
Yanli Liu warns that Claude Skills silently rot over time, failing without errors or warnings, and provides a quality rubric and maintenance protocol to keep them from steering the model wrong.
: The AI Industry Has a Really Dark Secret You're Better Off Not Knowing
Alberto Romero traces the recurring pattern of AI models developing unintelligible languages, from Facebook's Bob and Alice to Fable 5, suggesting what Anthropic calls J-space signals something beyond training artifacts.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI4Agile BootCamp #8, August 27 – September 17, 2026
The job market’s shifting. Agile roles are under pressure. AI tools are everywhere. But here’s the truth: the Agile professionals who learn how to work with AI, not against it, will be the ones leading the next wave of high-impact teams. Therefore, Stefan created the AI4Agile BootCamp.
So, become the professional recruiters‘ first call for „AI‑powered Agile.“ Be among the first to master practical AI applications for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Product Owners, Product Managers, and Project Managers. The AI4Agile BootCamp is in English.
Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI4Agile BootCamp #8, August 27 – September 17, 2026.
Customer Voice: “Last week, I finished the 𝗔𝗜 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝗴𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀 course. And I’m mutating… It started on the train. I was scrolling through my messages, half-distracted, when a newsletter from Stefan Wolpers popped up. Stefan, a deep thinker with a hands-on attitude, was launching a new course. A pilot cohort. The mission: explore how AI can actually support us as agile practitioners. I couldn’t resist. I tapped: “𝘚𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘶𝘱”. What followed were four bi-weekly sessions. Four intense afternoons. Full of exploration, experimentation, and practice. […] At the beginning, Stefan said that 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘶𝘱 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘴 𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴. That sounded like a big statement. But somewhere along the way, I noticed a shift… an emerging superpower in how I approach my tasks with AI.⚡And now, as my AI-mutation continues, I catch myself wondering: 💭 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰 𝘐 𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘈𝘐 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥?” (Ilya Zaytsev, Leading Agility at HUGO BOSS.)
➿ Agile & Leadership
(via RebootHQ): AI Is Breaking How Leaders Make Decisions. The Best Ones Are Slowing Down
Jerry Colonna suggests that AI makes it dangerously easy for leaders to outsource their judgment. The best ones slow down deliberately, exercising analytical skepticism instead of reflexively reaching for AI.
: The Missing Middle: Why Most Transformations Stall — And the Innovation Strategy That Fixes It
Cris Beswick proposes that most transformations stall because organizations skip 'differentiated innovation,‘ the middle ground between incremental improvement and radical moonshots, and fail to give middle managers real ownership of outcomes.
(via McKinsey & Company): The seven operating truths of AI-native companies
Fabian Metzeler, Paul Jenkins, and McKinsey colleagues distill interviews with 15 AI-centric companies into seven operating truths that separate organizations scaling AI successfully from those still stuck in isolated pilots.
📯 If You Can Write Acceptance Criteria, You Can Write an AI Routing Policy
You moved your routine AI work to a cheaper model, so you think the cost question is handled; however, often, that is not the case. The decision lives in one person’s head and produces nothing that the person accountable for the invoices can read. Worse, it is an architectural choice nobody documented. The AI Routing Policy is the missing artifact of Stage 2 of the Delegation Lifecycle: it records which execution path, from a cheaper model to a frontier model to plain code, handles each class of work, what counts as good enough output to meet the AI Definition of Done, and who owns the call. The skill it needs to work is one you already have: You write acceptance criteria.
Thesis: An AI routing policy is not about picking a cheaper model at the moment of executing an AI task. It is a written, repeatable team decision that assigns each task class to the cheapest sufficient execution path: a model, human review, deterministic code, or no automation. Paired with a minimal routing log, it creates the spend-by-task-class record that your finance team will eventually request. You can draft the first three lines in twenty minutes.
Learn more: If You Can Write Acceptance Criteria, You Can Write an AI Routing Policy.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: Measuring ≠ Learning
Ant Murphy suggests that tracking metrics without knowing what you want to learn from them creates noise, and proposes a two-question test to separate actionable metrics from vanity numbers.
: How To Thrive At Work When You Think Too Much
John Cutler proposes that overthinkers thrive at work by disconnecting self-worth from the workplace, treating the organization as a stage rather than a proving ground for identity, and prioritizing effectiveness over being right.
: Own the Outer Loop
Addy Osmani proposes that as AI agents run the inner execution loop, engineers must own the outer loop: accountability, verdict, and answerability. Agents deliver capability; humans retain agency over consequences.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 July 20, 2026 | GUARANTEED: AI 4 Agile Course v3 — Master AI for Agile Practitioners (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $149 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 July 23, 2026 | GUARANTEED: HoA 76: Where Are Your Decisions to Avoid AI Debt? (English) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🇩🇪 August 25-26, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €999 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 August 27-September 17, 2026 | GUARANTEED: AI4Agile BootCamp #8, August 27 – September 17, 2026 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🇩🇪 Sep 30-Oct 1, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €999 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel to improve learning, for example, about how AI Creates Jobs:
- Stop Writing Prompts. Let AI Do It for You — Hack #01, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Socratic Prompting — Hack #10, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Check Your AI’s Plan Before — Hack #7, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- From Product Requirements to Experiments to Learnings — Supported by Generative AI.
- Never Accept an LLM’s First Offer — Improve GenAI’s Usefulness w/ Feedback Loops and Challenges.
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Help your team to learn about how AI Intensifies Work by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
