Agile methodology and Artificial Intelligence are currently on a collision course. Agile’s “ship early and iterate” imperative is in tension with the AI imperative for “safety, fairness, and veracity” resulting in the phenomenon known as “Ethical Debt.” Similar to technical debt, Ethical Debt accumulates invisibly and compounds until it causes reputational bankruptcy or regulatory fines (e.g., EU AI Act, up to 7% of global turnover).
In this session we offer a practical expert-level roadmap for reconciling these forces. We’ll unpack the concept of Ethical Debt and show the real-world price of negligence with case studies from Amazon and iTutorGroup. Then we will move to solutions, showing how to “refactor” Agile ceremonies and artifacts for the AI age. Attendees will learn to:
Use "Fairness Acceptance Criteria" in user stories to test ethics.
Conduct “Consequence Scanning” workshops in your sprint planning to surface risks earlier.
Adopt “CI/CD for Ethics” by automating fairness checks with open-source tools such as Fairlearn and MLflow to build a “compliance-as-code” pipeline.
The talk ends with a detailed “Definition of Done” for AI to ensure that speed does not come at the expense of society. Come join us and learn how to move fast, without breaking the world.