Conference season is back, and so are the real conversations. In this episode, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock catch up after a busy stretch of travel and dig into something Dave has been road-testing at conferences: why most people given access to AI tools freeze up, and what actually helps them move past that.

Dave ran a workshop at the Global Scrum Gathering in Vancouver for non-technical roles - product managers, Scrum Masters, agile coaches - people who've been told "use AI" but have no clear picture of where to start. What he found is that the problem isn't motivation or technical ability. It's the lack of scaffolding. Give people the right structure and the right room to experiment, and things shift pretty quickly.

The conversation then moves into multi-agent systems - how Dave's team built a group of agents that continuously refresh the workshop itself based on current thinking. Peter adds his own take on testing these systems with personas and automated quality evaluation. It gets a bit technical, but in the best way.

This is a good episode if you're thinking about how to help your organization actually use AI, not just adopt it on paper.

Key Takeaways:

• Context beats generic. Prompts work when they're specific to your role and your actual problems. A product manager needs product management context, not a one-size-fits-all example.
• Think in teams, not steps. Multi-agent systems work best when you treat them like a team reviewing an artifact, each agent checking for something different, rather than a linear build process.
• Don't assume everyone gets it. The gap between people who use AI daily and people who tried it once and gave up is wider than most of us realize. Getting both groups in the same room is where the real learning happens, for everyone.

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