Increase AI Points: The New Agile Metric for Sprints

In the world of Agile and Scrum, we are obsessed with velocity. We track how many story points a team can burn down in a one-week cycle. But a recent retrospective by our team, featuring Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland, highlighted a crucial evolution in how we should measure work.

It is no longer just about how fast we work; it is about who—or what—is doing the work.

The new objective is clear: Increase AI points and decrease human points.

Whether you are a project manager, a developer, or a general reader interested in productivity, here is how you can apply these cutting-edge insights to your workflow.

What Are “AI Points” vs. “Human Points”?

During the retrospective, Jeff Sutherland introduced a pivotal concept. He emphasized that the most important story in every sprint is the one that fundamentally shifts the balance of labor.

• Human Points: These represent tasks done manually. Examples include writing SEO copy by hand, manually compiling data from Google Analytics into a spreadsheet, or tweaking website code line-by-line.
• AI Points: These represent the value generated by AI agents and automation. This includes AI automatically generating dashboards, plugins rewriting content based on keywords, or AI performing deep analysis on data sets.

The goal is to use your sprint not just to “do work,” but to build the machine that does the work for you.

How to Get Recommendations for Automation

Before you can shift the balance, you need to know what to automate. Our team didn’t guess; we used AI to find the solution.

In the retrospective, a team member identified a specific solution for automating WordPress SEO copy. How? She asked Gemini 3.0.

Tips for the General Reader:

You don’t need to be a coding expert to find these opportunities. You can replicate this process:

1. Identify the Drudgery: Find a task you do repeatedly (e.g., “I spend 2 hours a week summarizing emails”).
2. Prompt the AI for Strategy, Not Just Output: Instead of asking ChatGPT or Gemini to write the summary, ask: “What are the current best AI agents or plugins that can automatically screen-scrape my emails and generate a dashboard summary without me touching it?”
3. Validate the Tool: The team prioritized investigating the tool to ensure it actually reduces manual work before fully committing.

3 Strategies to Shift Your Ratio

Based on the Newfire Connect team’s roadmap, here are three practical ways to increase your AI points immediately.

1. Automate Your Reporting (The “Agent” Approach)

One of the biggest drains on “Human points” is reporting. In the meeting, the team discussed the drudgery of Google Analytics monthly reports.

• The Old Way (Manual): A human logs in, takes screenshots, pastes them into a doc, and writes a summary.
• The New Way (AI): Jeff Sutherland proposed using an AI agent (similar to how they handle expense reports) to screen-scrape the data and automatically build the dashboard.

Takeaway: If you are copy-pasting data, you are wasting human points. Look for AI agents that can read the data source directly.

2. Deep Analysis Over Data Entry

The Scrum Master noted that their reporting task wasn’t just about generation—it was about analysis.

Jeff Sutherland noted that AI is now capable of “deep analysis,” similar to summarizing medical papers for malaria research. Instead of a human trying to connect the dots between a blog post and a spike in traffic, AI can analyze the conversation and suggest enhancements.

Takeaway: Use humans for decision-making, but use AI to process the raw information and find the patterns.

3. Fix Your Process to Feed the AI

You cannot increase AI points if your data is messy. The team realized that to perform a “Sprint Process Efficiency Analysis” using AI, they needed better raw data—specifically, the exact start date of a story.

Because Jira wasn’t tracking this effectively, Jeff suggested a process change: adding a “Start Column” in the workflow.

Takeaway: Sometimes, to get better AI recommendations, you need to change your human behavior slightly (like moving a card to a specific column) to ensure the AI has clean data to learn from.

The Bottom Line

The future of high-performing teams isn’t about working harder; it’s about working smarter by leveraging AI.

As you plan your next week or your next sprint, ask yourself the question Jeff Sutherland posed to his team: “Which task on this list will permanently reduce the amount of human effort required for this job in the future?”

Prioritize that task. That is how you win at the game of AI points.

Suggested Next Steps for You

• Audit your to-do list: Identify one recurring task this week that takes more than 1 hour.
• Ask an AI: “What tools exist to fully automate [Task X]?”
• Implement: Spend your time installing that tool rather than doing the task itself.