AI Delivery's New Path: Agile Pods Pave the Way Forward
Inclusion Cloud, a leading technology company, is transforming the way AI projects are delivered by introducing Agile Pods. These small, cross-functional teams are designed to be adaptable, autonomous, and efficient, offering significant benefits over traditional delivery models.
The Agile Pod Advantage
Agile Pods are accountable for a specific feature or project and follow sprint cycles, typically two weeks long. Each sprint involves setting goals, building, testing, and delivering something tangible. For instance, Sprint 1 involves building a simple prototype, such as a chatbot that answers FAQs, while Sprint 4 refines the prototype, adds analytics, and ships a usable version.
The key benefits of Agile Pods in AI projects include:
- Flexibility and Adaptability: Agile Pods can be quickly scaled up or down and reconfigured with the needed expertise, allowing for better resource efficiency and faster innovation.
- Autonomy and Clear Ownership: Each pod is responsible for end-to-end delivery of features or components, fostering accountability and speeding up decision-making.
- Faster Delivery and Innovation Cycles: Agile Pods work in iterative sprints with continuous feedback, enabling quicker adjustments and faster release cycles compared to traditional models.
- Improved Collaboration and Transparency: Agile Pods incorporate daily standups and shared rituals that enhance communication and coordination.
- Cost and Risk Management: Agile Pods allow companies to optimize spending by paying only for the capacity and skills needed during specific project phases.
Agile Pods at Inclusion Cloud
At Inclusion Cloud, Agile Pods are organized around the AI product lifecycle, with each pod taking ownership of a specific phase. For example, the Prototyping Pod builds early-stage proof-of-concepts, pilots, or MVPs, while the Development Pod handles the heavy lifting, including backend architecture, APIs, data pipelines, and frontend components.
The Evolution Pod manages products post-launch, handling feature enhancements, model retraining, and overall performance improvements. The DevOps Pod ensures the infrastructure is solid, building CI/CD pipelines, automating testing, managing observability tools, and ensuring the system is scalable and resilient.
The Importance of Fit
Agile Pods only work if the people inside them are strong enough to carry that autonomy. Inclusion Cloud puts just as much weight on communication skills and product understanding as technical skills. When the team truly fits your needs, Agile Pods can lead to significant benefits, including 50% lower attrition, 2x faster time to market, 3x delivery velocity at higher maturity, 50% reduction in coordination overhead, and 15-25% cost improvement per maturity increment.
Inclusion Cloud uses an AI-powered recruiting engine to identify the top 1% of talent in under 72 hours. They look for senior engineers, certified architects, analysts, and designers who understand how to collaborate, think in systems, and align with business goals.
In the specific context of AI projects, these pods facilitate integrating complex AI and machine learning expertise seamlessly, supporting faster model iterations and deployment cycles, and better handling of evolving technical challenges. Moreover, Agile Pods align well with modern AI operations (AIOps) practices, which emphasize automation, scalability, and rapid issue resolution to maximize engineering efficiency.
In contrast, traditional delivery models typically have fixed requirements, longer release cycles, slower response to changing needs, siloed communication, and less scalable talent access, making them less suited for the dynamic and iterative nature of AI development.
Overall, Agile Pods enable AI teams to balance innovation, speed, and quality more effectively than traditional delivery approaches by leveraging autonomous, flexible, cross-functional teams that can rapidly evolve with AI project demands.
If you're interested in learning more about how Agile Pods can transform your AI projects, Inclusion Cloud is always happy to share what's worked and set up a discovery call with their specialists.
- Inclusion Cloud strategically organizes their Agile Pods around the AI product lifecycle, assigning each pod a specific phase to ensure efficient delivery and continuous improvement.
- The finance department at Inclusion Cloud benefits from using Agile Pods as they optimize spending by only paying for the capacity and skills needed during specific project phases.
- The training programs at Inclusion Cloud focus on developing strong communication skills, product understanding, and system-level thinking in addition to technical skills, as these are essential for the autonomy and efficiency of Agile Pods.
