Hosted by Alex Birke (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbirke/)), live from the SAFe & AI Summit 2026 in Amsterdam, this episode of Agile Amped features Alison McCauley, author, speaker, and change management strategist who has been working in AI since 2010.

Organizations are spending 93% of their AI investment on technology and only 7% on helping people actually use it, the same mistake made in every prior tech wave, from CRM to cloud. Allison draws on her early career pioneering one of the first enterprise CRM rollouts to show that the lesson has never changed: meet people where they are and show them value that matters to their lives.

The antidote is identifying and nurturing internal passionistas, people already experimenting with AI on their own, and turning them into circles of influence and change agents. Pair that with storytelling (not just successes, but the messy route to get there) and genuine two-way feedback channels, and organizations can close the gap between what AI can do and what their people are doing with it.

Allison also challenges practitioners to get their hands dirty first. If AI isn't blowing your mind on a weekly basis, you aren't pushing hard enough. The field is moving too fast for anyone to hold all the knowledge, the competitive advantage now belongs to those who can guide others through ambiguity using proven frameworks, not those who pretend to have all the answers.

Her closing reframe: don't stop at efficiency. The organizations that win the AI era won't just automate fastest, they'll be the ones that reallocate freed human capacity to create new markets, serve new customers, and build things that have genuine new economic value. Speed to learn, not speed to launch, is the new competitive edge.

Connect with Alison McCauley:

Hosted by Alex Birke (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbirke/)), live from the SAFe & AI Summit 2026 in Amsterdam, this episode of Agile Amped features Darren Wilmhurst, Managing Director for Europe at Cprime, SAFe SPCT, and author of the SAFe Coach's Handbook.

Every organization Darren works with shares the same pattern: more demand than capacity, prioritization driven by opinion rather than economics, and a strategy that can't be connected to execution. None of this is new but the AI gold rush is flooding an already overloaded demand funnel with a wave of new initiatives that are often started bottom-up, without governance, guardrails, or any clear link to a real business problem.

Darren's practical response: recognize the actual problem first, then examine what belongs in the demand funnel. Build an economic prioritization framework using cost of delay rather than opinion. Invest in tooling that connects portfolio visibility to team-level execution because large organizations managing portfolio epics in spreadsheets are one data breach away from a serious governance failure.

For AI experiments specifically, the Horizon model offers a structured answer: Horizon Zero funds legacy decommissioning, Horizon One protects core products, Horizon Three provides seed funding for time-boxed experiments, and Horizon Two commercializes whatever proves its legs but only one or two at a time. As Geoffrey Moore put it: a hen can only lay one egg at a time.

His final advice: don't try to boil the ocean. Pick one portfolio, run a vertical slice from strategy to team level, prove it out, and grow from there. Leaders who aren't educating themselves on AI risks and governance frameworks now will find themselves consumed by the very wave they're trying to ride.

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Hosted by Alex Birke (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbirke/)), live from the SAFe & AI Summit 2026 in Amsterdam, this episode of Agile Amped features Saahil Panickar, SAFe Fellow and SPCT, and Zack Brown, Partner Solution Strategist at Atlassian.

AI is a force multiplier and that's exactly the problem. It amplifies the current state of your organization, including its dysfunction. Companies with poor data quality, inconsistent tooling hygiene, or undisciplined processes will find that AI makes those problems significantly worse, not better. As Saahil puts it: garbage in, garbage out, just faster and at scale.

Zack adds the practitioner perspective from Atlassian: successful AI implementation requires specificity. Rather than chasing a broad AI strategy, identify two concrete use cases, point them at real contextual data, and build from there. The conversation introduces the concept of the "gated garden", a secure, human-curated single source of truth from which AI models draw their inputs and the ongoing practice of data gardening to keep it valid.

The guests draw a clear parallel to previous enterprise tech waves: DevOps, cloud, SRE. Each went through hype, failure, and a more disciplined second wave. AI will be no different. A first wave of failures is coming for organizations that skip the foundations. The ones that invest in individual AI literacy, proper mechanics, and intentional pilots will lead the second.

Their closing message reframes the competitive landscape: it's no longer big eats small, or even fast eats slow. In an AI-enabled world, the organizations that outlearn the competition will be the ones that survive and thrive.

Connect with Saahil Panickar and Zack Brown:

Hosted by Renaud Granier (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaud-granier/)), live from the SAFe & AI Summit 2026 in Amsterdam, this episode of Agile Amped features Dr. Wolfgang Brandhuber, SAFe Fellow and SPCT, and one of the foremost authorities on large solution delivery within the Scaled Agile Framework.

Wolfgang opens with a foundational reframe agility is not a methodology it is the act of building and sustaining collaboration networks. Every agile framework, from Scrum to SAFe, is orchestrating the same six properties: mutual knowledge, transparency of contribution, freedom to roam, a shared definition of success, end-to-end autonomous delivery, and psychological safety. Remove any one of these and the network begins to break down.

He traces agility through four waves: team (10 people), multi-team coordination (50), Agile Release Train (120) and makes the case that the fourth wave is already here: solution trains of 400 to 480 people. The mechanics are different at each level, and the jump to solution trains is no more intuitive than PI planning seemed the first time you encountered it.

The key insight: the solution train level is exclusively about refinement, not execution. It creates and continuously updates a large solution roadmap, an aligned view of direction across all ARTs from which each train branches a one-PI execution plan at PI planning. This structure unlocks a qualitatively higher class of complex problems: legacy replacements, post-merger system integrations, cross-system dependencies that have resisted resolution for years or even decades.

Wolfgang closes with his current work with the DAG 30, a private peer group of the 30 most valuable brands in German-speaking countries, where several companies with mature ART landscapes are now working toward a common standard for large-scale agility. His advice for getting started: run your first solution train conference, bring 60 to 100 representatives together, and build the overarching roadmap. The collaboration shift happens immediately.

Connect with Dr. Wolfgang Brandhuber:

Hosted by Renaud Granier (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaud-granier/)), live from the SAFe & AI Summit

Luke explains how portfolio investment decisions hinge on three dimensions of value customer, organizational, and cost and how SAFe's investment horizons (zero through three) help executive teams balance short-term returns with long-term strategic bets. The often-overlooked Horizon Zero covers the intentional decommissioning of legacy systems that can't simply be switched off.

At the heart of the conversation is participatory budgeting not just as a funding mechanism, but as a powerful communication tool. Through a real-world example with Verisign, Luke shows how underfunded initiatives fail not because of poor strategy, but because of poor explanation. When the leadership team finally communicated clearly, near-universal support followed and implementation accelerated immediately.

Luke also introduces Horizon Invest, his new participatory budgeting tool built on consent-based voting protocols inspired by holacracy designed to help executive teams reach investment decisions as a unit, preventing the organizational friction that arises when leaders quietly second-guess collective decisions.

His key message: the same principles driving citizen engagement in public budgeting are just as powerful inside companies striving to align strategy with execution. Making the decision-making process visible and participatory is what creates real organizational hustle.

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Hosted by Renaud Granier (https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaud-granier/)), live from the SAFe & AI Summit 2026 in Amsterdam, this episode of Agile Amped features Peter Vollmer, one of the leading voices in Value Stream Thinking and enterprise flow optimization.

Peter explains why many organizations still optimize silos instead of value streams and how that creates hidden bottlenecks, long feedback loops, and quality issues. Instead of only measuring outcomes at the end of delivery pipelines, Value Stream Thinking focuses on identifying waste and constraints directly at integration points.

In the conversation, Peter shares the four perspectives of Value Stream Thinking: enterprise view, domain view, model-series performance view, and transformation maturity view. Together, they help organizations build a shared understanding of where friction exists and where transformation efforts should begin.

His key advice for leaders: start with understanding your context before jumping into action. There is no universal transformation blueprint successful change starts with making the invisible visible.

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