EA2 Jeff Sutherland's Bold Prediction: 30x Faster with AI
Jeff Sutherland's Bold Prediction: 30x Faster with AI
The Man Who Invented Scrum Wants to Reinvent It Again
Jeff Sutherland isn't a thought leader chasing trends. He's the co-creator of Scrum—the framework that has transformed how millions of people work. For decades, he's refined Agile practices to help teams deliver value faster and with higher quality.
Jeff Sutherland
His work helped organizations break free from waterfall's rigid constraints and embrace adaptive, iterative delivery. Scrum became the gold standard for software development and beyond.
But Sutherland isn't resting on his legacy. He's looking ahead—and what he sees is a fundamental shift in how Agile teams will operate.
"We're Moving Into Extreme Agile"
In early 2025, Sutherland shared a vision that should make every Scrum practitioner sit up and pay attention:
"I'm trying to take Scrum and move it to at least 30 times faster with AI. We're moving into a world in which I'm calling extreme agile. If you're a CEO of a company, you need to bring scrum trained AI people in to take your agile to the extreme agile place. That's where you need to be before 2030. And you're not going to get there unless you start today."
Let that sink in.
Not 30% faster. Thirty times faster.
This isn't about incremental improvement. It's about orders of magnitude. It's about collapsing timelines so dramatically that what once took months happens in weeks, and what once took weeks happens in days.
Why This Isn't Hyperbole
If anyone else made this claim, you'd be right to be skeptical. But Sutherland understands Scrum's mechanics better than anyone. He knows where teams lose time, where friction builds up, and where bottlenecks slow everything down.
And he sees exactly how AI can eliminate those bottlenecks.
Consider the typical friction points in Scrum:
Backlog refinement sessions that drag on for hours while the team debates story wording, checks INVEST criteria, and argues over priorities.
Development cycles where writing boilerplate code, setting up tests, and debugging edge cases consume the bulk of a sprint.
Scrum events where someone has to take notes, track action items, and remember what was said in yesterday's standup.
Documentation that teams put off because writing release notes and technical specs feels like pulling teeth.
Team dynamics issues that fester under the surface until they explode in a retrospective.
Now imagine AI handling the heavy lifting in all of these areas—not replacing humans, but removing the friction that slows humans down.
The Cumulative Effect
When you accelerate backlog refinement by 10x, and development by 5x, and documentation by 20x, and event facilitation by 3x, the effects don't just add up—they multiply.
That's where Sutherland's 30x claim comes from. It's not about one silver bullet. It's about dozens of accelerations stacking together to create exponential gains.
The Urgency Is Real
Here's the part that should worry traditional Agile teams: Sutherland says you can't wait.
"You need to be [at extreme agile] before 2030. And you're not going to get there unless you start today."
Why the urgency? Because enterprises like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are already investing heavily in AI-augmented Agile practices. They're not experimenting—they're implementing at scale.
Teams that resist this shift risk being left behind. Not slowly. Quickly.
What This Means for You
If you're a Scrum Master, Product Owner, or Developer, learning how to integrate AI into Scrum is no longer optional. It's becoming a core career skill—like learning Scrum itself was 15 years ago.
The question isn't whether AI will change Agile. It's whether you'll be ready when it does.
Coming up in Part 3: Traditional Agile vs. Extreme Agile—what actually changes when AI joins your Scrum team?
Check out our Extreme Agile Course Part 1 Here: Click Here For More Information
