Guest: Sanjiv Augustine, Founder & CEO of LitheSpeed
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Episode Date: October 2025
Duration: ~41 minutes
Watch on YouTube

Ever wonder why your company's AI initiative feels like that disastrous Agile rollout all over again?

Meet Sanjiv Augustine - who's spent 30 years watching companies make the same mistakes with every shiny new thing. First Scrum. Then SAFe. Now AI. And he's got the receipts.

70-80% of AI pilots are failing. But here's the kicker - it's not because AI doesn't work. It's because we're doing it wrong. Again.

Sanjiv worked with Capital One when they scaled Agile 15 years ago. In 2022, they laid off their entire Agile coaching unit. Why? They'd actually succeeded. Nationwide Insurance now has 500+ Agile teams - they just don't call them that anymore. It's just "how we work."

And now we're repeating history with AI.

Picture this: A client walks in with ChatGPT answers, asking Sanjiv to validate them.

Instead of freaking out, Sanjiv welcomes it. "Before, perhaps we could make up stuff and nobody would know. Now, perhaps it's ChatGPT that's making up stuff and we have to validate whether it's right or not."

The consulting playbook just got rewritten in real-time.

"If you fail at Agile, you're going to fail at AI."

Companies are mindlessly adopting AI without considering people or context - exactly like they did with Agile frameworks. Different tech, same failures. The companies winning? They're subjugating AI to two things: business purpose and human beings.

Here's where it gets sobering: Only 250,000 people globally are building AI tools that will affect all 7 billion of us.

Sanjiv doesn't sugarcoat it. "AI is an existential threat. And the reason I'm a big advocate of AI is simply because of that existential threat."

Leaders need to be inside the tent looking out, not outside looking in. Because with humanity's track record with powerful technology? This could go very wrong very fast.

Sanjiv's proprietary solution combines three pillars:

Iterative Development - Plan, do, check, act. Test, learn, repeat. Don't boil the ocean.

Incremental Products - Break AI adoption into small pieces. One organization he works with is integrating AI into customer service one workflow at a time.

Responsible AI - Check for bias. Consider human impact. Make it people-first, just like Agile should have been.

This is how you land in that 20-30% of AI projects that actually succeed.

Sanjiv's book "From PMO to VMO" dropped four years ago, but it's more relevant now than ever.

Stop measuring velocity. Start measuring customer satisfaction and revenue. Stop focusing on your teams. Start focusing on your customers. It's the shift from outputs to outcomes - and it's quietly transforming how forward-thinking companies operate.

Sanjiv's first job? Riding a moped delivering print materials for an ad agency. The lesson? How to marry creativity with hard deadlines and business outcomes.

Which book would he save from a fire? None of them. "All learning is temporary" - he'd save something values-based instead.

His AI toolkit? Perplexity for research, ChatGPT for daily use, Claude for validation.

Website: https://lithespeed.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjivaugustine/
His Podcast: Leadership in Flux - https://lithespeed.com/leadership_in_flux/

Free Tool: Agile VMO Chatbot on OpenAI

Books: "From PMO to VMO: Managing for Value Delivery" | "Managing Agile Projects" | "Scaling Agile: A Lean JumpStart"

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"AI is an existential threat. It'll become one unless leaders like ourselves understand what it's capable of and steer its trajectory towards positive outcomes, not negative outcomes." - Sanjiv Augustine

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