Artificial intelligence is a wave that is already here and transforming enterprises, promising a future vastly different from our experiences, environment, and work today. If your agile team isn't already touching backlog items related to AI, it soon will be - or a team better prepared to handle AI work may intercept what will become an increasingly larger share of enterprise workloads.

Agile teams have the imperative to start working with AI technology and tools, incorporate an AI focus into their current and future backlogs, and begin delivering more than just working code: Working models, experiments, and cognitive services that augment and expand the capabilities of their applications and enterprises.

This new world includes new team roles, like Data Scientist; new development pipeline tools: Automated data ingest and scrubbers, data lakes, algorithm libraries, test and training data repositories, model registries, AI labs; and new processes and tasks, such as cognitive service integration, data labeling, model training, testing, and deployment, and algorithm performance evaluation.

This talk describes the tools, infrastructure, roles, and agile process changes required for taking on AI epics so that your team can can get started on its own AI journey.

Agile methods help to build a repeatable and reliable pipeline of working code to production. Unfortunately, complex enterprises, including the US government, consider agile the solution to finding and solving all their copious and complex problem. In this space, agile alone is not enough. Reliable enterprise problem-finding and solution-creation techniques aren't yet embedded in the agile toolkit, but nonetheless that's the toolkit brought to bear on critical, complex organization-spanning issues. Typical problem/solution methods can create a local optimization (look at this great thing the team delivered!) but create a global failure (the team didn't consider the other systems and teams involved in the process, and broke them). This is the norm, not the exception, and why large project solutions are typically "meh", not "wow". Given agile is now the de facto approach, now is the time to focus on being exceptional.

In this talk, we'll cover three years of the fight to achieve agile success on a critical project at the Department of Veterans Affairs: the struggle to enable an agile environment and the realization of what agile at scale REALLY means; the tactical and strategic efforts to identify the fundamental, success-blocking problems of the enterprise, and how to solve them; and what it takes, from discovery, analysis/design, code/test, and release to production, to deliver actual value, and not just "working code."