TL; DR: AI Employment Effects — Food for Agile Thought #508
Welcome to the 508th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,487 peers. This week, Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen highlight recent AI employment effects — a 13 percent decline in employment among early-career workers in AI-exposed roles, driven by automation rather than augmentation. Marty Cagan builds on Shreyas Doshi’s product leadership archetypes, emphasizing the irreplaceable role of product craft, and John Cutler encourages teams to treat urgency as a strategic tool. Mustafa Suleyman cautions against overestimating simulated AI consciousness, and James Newhook demonstrates how AI can enhance persona research without replacing human insight.
Next, David Pereira and Anthony Argenziano show how PMs can stay strategic by combining structured discovery with AI support. Anthropic researchers reveal how AI is lowering the barrier for cybercrime at scale. Also, Ant Murphy outlines seven habits of effective, team-first leaders, while Graham Ward defends coaching as a deeply human craft built on trust. Zvi Mowshowitz challenges claims of AI stagnation, pointing instead to flawed expectations and brittle workflows.
Lastly, Tiffany Anderson demonstrates how misaligned teams hinder growth and how a shared understanding of customers accelerates execution. Nick Lichtenberg reveals that a booming shadow AI economy is quietly outperforming official adoption. Sangeet Paul Choudary calls for AI-native business models, not bolt-ons, while Andi Roberts reframes chronic complaints as unmet needs. Finally, Martin Fowler urges hands-on AI experimentation while warning of hallucinations, security risks, and the misleading comfort of surveys and hype cycles.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week
(via Stanford HAI): Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence
Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen reveal that early-career workers in AI-exposed jobs face a 13 percent employment drop, driven by automation rather than augmentation. At the same time, older and less exposed roles remain stable. The shifts affect employment more than pay and signal early structural impacts of generative AI.
🎯 Product
(via Silicon Valley Product Group): Product Leadership Archetypes
Marty Cagan reflects on Shreyas Doshi’s product leadership archetypes, craftsperson, operator, and visionary, arguing that while many leaders blend traits, real product craft is the non-negotiable foundation for lasting impact.
: Strategy & Urgency
John Cutler reframes urgency as a strategic variable, not a distraction. He argues that understanding how timing affects long-term value unlocks better prioritization, shifting teams from reactive to proactive decision-making.
: The Product Discovery Method That Takes Minutes, Not Months
David Pereira and Anthony Argenziano explore how PMs can escape reactive feature delivery by combining structured discovery practices with AI support to stay strategic, handle stakeholder noise, and respond quickly without compromising product thinking.
(via Strategyn): The Team Alignment Problem Killing Your Growth Strategy
Tiffany Anderson explains how misaligned teams, each optimizing for different customer signals, silently sabotage growth strategies, and how a shared, quantified understanding of customers can turn coordination chaos into accelerated execution.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: We must build AI for people; not to be a person
Mustafa Suleyman warns that ‘Seemingly Conscious AI’ is both technically feasible and socially dangerous. He argues we must urgently set norms and guardrails to prevent people from treating simulated consciousness as real, which risks distorting relationships, rights, and societal stability.
(via Anthropic): Detecting and countering misuse of AI: August 2025
Anthropic researchers expose how cybercriminals weaponize AI for extortion, fraud, and ransomware operations by automating reconnaissance, identity theft, and malware generation, thereby dramatically lowering the expertise barrier and amplifying the scale of attacks.
: You think you are AI-first, but you probably aren't
Sangeet Paul Choudary argues that being truly AI-native means rearchitecting your business around AI’s structural logic, rather than merely bolting it onto legacy systems. Like past transformations, advantage shifts when the atomic unit changes.
(via Fortune): The 'shadow AI economy' is booming: Workers at 90% of companies say they use chatbots, but most of them are hiding it from IT
Nick Lichtenberg reports that while only 40% of companies officially use AI tools, employees in over 90% quietly rely on personal chatbots, fueling a booming shadow AI economy with better real-world adoption and ROI.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 — September 15 – October 6, 2025
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Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 — September 15 – October 6, 2025.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
: Good Leader, Bad Leader
Ant Murphy shares seven habits of standout leaders who prioritize their teams, adapt their style, stay hands-on, share openly, and treat leadership as a collaborative act rather than a status symbol.
: How can I deal with a team member who is always complaining?
Andi Roberts reframes chronic complaining as a signal of unmet needs, such as agency, belonging, or care, and shows how leaders can shift team culture by replacing fixes with inquiry and shared ownership.
(via INSEAD Knowledge): Why AI Won’t Replace Human Coaches
Graham Ward argues that while AI can deliver insights, true coaching is a relational craft built on presence, attunement, and trust. Human connection, not correct answers, is what enables lasting transformation and growth.
📯 Meta Prompting: Making AI Your Conversation Partner
We’ve all been there: You’re preparing for the next Retrospective, and you turn to ChatGPT for help. “Give me some Retrospective ideas,” you type. What do you get back? Generic templates you’ve seen a hundred times before: Set the Stage, Gather Data, Generate Insights, Decide What to Do, and Close the Retrospective. (Kudos to Esther Derby and Diana Larsen for the format!) The problem isn’t the AI. It’s how we’re asking: We are ignoring the benefits of Meta Prompting or having a conversation with the AI before jumping to task completion.
So, let’s start partnering with our AI. (📺 Prefer to watch a video instead of reading a text?)
🎓 Learn more: Meta Prompting: Making AI Your Conversation Partner.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: Some thoughts on LLMs and Software Development
Martin Fowler urges practitioners to experiment with LLMs while scrutinizing workflows, warns that surveys can be misleading, calls AI a bubble, accepts hallucinations as intrinsic, and highlights serious security risks associated with agentic access to private data.
: Reports Of AI Not Progressing Or Offering Mundane Utility Are Often Greatly Exaggerated
Zvi Mowshowitz dissects claims that AI is stagnating, arguing instead that adoption struggles reflect poor metrics, workflow misalignment, and unrealistic expectations. He warns that the real divide is between static tools and systems that learn, adapt, and evolve.
(via IxDF - Interaction Design Foundation): AI for Persona Research and Creation: Build Better Profiles in Less Time
James Newhook outlines how AI can supercharge persona development without replacing human empathy. From research planning to coding data and generating realistic persona visuals, AI streamlines the grunt work, allowing you to focus on insights and impact.
📅 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 February 3, 2026 | Guaranteed: HoA #71: A3 Framework — Assist, Automate, Avoid — Let’s Build a Playbook! (English; Live Virtual Workshop) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 February 10-11, 2026 | Guaranteed: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 March 10-11, 2026 | Professional Scrum Master—Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 March 19 to April 16, 2026 | Guaranteed: AI4Agile BootCamp #6 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 March 24-25, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
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 the AI Employment Effects:
- Hands-on Agile #68: How to Analyze Unstructured Team Interview Data with AI.
- Fabrice Bernhard: The Lean Tech Manifesto.
- Maarten Dalmijn: The 5 Obstacles to Empowered Teams.
- Roman Pichler: The Top Reasons Why a Product Strategy Fails.
- Johanna Rothman: How to Instill Agility, not Agile Practices.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Learn more about the AI Employment Effects — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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If you would like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
Help your team to learn about Personal AI Productivity by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
