Until now most of the teams I was dealing with were adding AI into their ways of working. This would be ‘Level 1’ or ‘Level 2’ according Notion’s AI transformation model.
This is the first time for me to support a team that was undergoing a full AI transformation – so Level 3, which has agents as team members and requires a full refactoring of the roles, artefacts and approaches.
It’s still early days but a few things are becoming clear about what is needed before starting with an AI transformation.
The team needs to have:
- A clear vision of an AI Native Team North Star
- The capacity to undertake this transformation (most teams so far have already been at 100% capacity and have been reluctant to add AI / automation work on top)
- The data and metrics that form the current baseline. This often incomplete or lacking, but necessary to know how AI helped the team and business (from quality to throughput).
- The commitment to know that they will benefit from this transformation. As mentioned before most teams are at capacity, and as our research showed, what teams really want from AI is to reduce low level menial work and do more high level creative work.
- An approach. We’re all still in the dark about what’s the best approach but we can start.
- The guardrails. This is crucial and will be co-created with the team.
When these criteria are in place, it’s time for an AI-Native Liftoff! In terms of team collaboration, a lot of things will remain the same but how teams work in the new world of Agentic AI is radically different. This is a quickly moving domain and our best guesses for now are also regularly changing.