Team Topologies as the 'Infrastructure for Agency' with AI

The presentation explores how organizational structures can effectively integrate AI through the principles of team topologies.

Main Points:

• Bounded Agency: The concept of bounded agency is emphasized as crucial for clarifying missions and responsibilities within an organization, making it better suited for humane and effective AI adoption.
• Organization for Value Flow: Organizations should start with understanding the value they provide and aim for a rapid, safe, and sustainable flow of value. A clear team purpose facilitates this, enhancing organizational observability.
• Key Principles for AI and Teams: The presentation focuses on four main principles:
  • Trust in teams and AI grounded in bounded agency.
  • Avoiding unbounded access to data to maintain security and efficiency.
  • Empowering teams to steward AI using team topologies principles.
  • Framing decisions around architecture and technology with these principles.
• AI Governance: Governance should not only exist in policies but be embedded in system architectures to scale effectively, signaling the importance of enterprise architects' roles.
• Organizational Success with AI: Successful organizations are not those with the most advanced models, but those organized for trust, clarity, and bounded autonomy, following blueprints provided by team topologies.

Conclusion:

The session concludes with a discussion on the need for possibly extending vocabulary to describe new interaction patterns and team structures arising from AI integration, acknowledging the dynamic nature of technology and organizational needs.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

The book Team Topologies Second Edition (2025) demonstrates convincingly that organizing business and technology for fast flow of value via empowered teams produces outsized results for enterprises worldwide. As evidence from AI adoption spreads, it’s clear that organizations that already organize for bounded agency in humans are well-suited to adopting AI effectively and humanely.

The core principles from Team Topologies - organizing and empowering teams around independently-viable services, making cognitive load a key design principle, and making capabilities available via clear “vending machine” interfaces - translate superbly into the AI space by providing guardrails and heuristics for effective AI agency.

In this talk, Matthew Skelton - co-author of the groundbreaking book Team Topologies - shares deep insights about how organizations can find success with AI by using the patterns and principles from Team Topologies, based on experience with hundreds of organizations worldwide.