Most conversations about AI focus on what it can do in a controlled setting. This one doesn't. Callum Sharrock spends his days deploying AI systems in real environments, watching them succeed and fail in ways no simulation predicted, and reporting what he finds. His conclusion? The trend line is steeper than most people realize, and snapshot thinking is getting a lot of organizations into trouble.

Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock dig into why reliability, not capability, is the real adoption bottleneck right now. They talk through what happens when non-deterministic models get applied to problems that need deterministic answers, why validation and testing are becoming more important than writing the code itself, and how the calculus around decision making is changing fast. If you can build and test something in the time it takes to debate whether to do it, the meeting starts to look like the problem.

They also get into what this means for developers, for leaders, and for anyone trying to figure out where to actually invest their energy right now. The barriers to building have never been lower. That makes the question of what to build more important than ever.

This isn't a conversation about AI hype. It's about what's actually happening at the frontier, and what it means for the way organizations make decisions.

This Week's Takeaways:

1. The barriers to building have never been lower - figuring out what's worth building is now the real work
2. Leadership is shifting toward agency and rapid decision-making, away from top-down strategy setting
3. If you can run the experiment in the time it takes to schedule the meeting about it, run the experiment

If this episode resonated, follow Definitely Maybe Agile wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a conversation. And if you know someone spending two hours debating whether to test an idea they could just build, send this one their way. There are plenty more episodes worth your time at definitelymaybeagile.com.