#LeanTech: Lean, Agile, and DevOps Leaders Will Gather to Discuss AI’s Role in Value Creation at Lean Summit

There’s a misconception that lean leaders in manufacturing (who primarily deal with hardware) and agile and DevOps leaders in tech (who primarily deal with software) have little to learn from each other. Fans of agile, DevOps, and lean tend to stay in their silos, perhaps due to living and working in different contexts. But, as DevOps leader and LEI Lean Summit 2026 keynote speaker Gene Kim reminds us, all these methodologies share principles that are worth becoming familiar with in full if business leaders want to understand how to build effective, healthy, profitable organizations… first by building teams of people who understand how to solve problems within enabling conditions.

In his book Wiring the Winning Organization, Gene tells the story of meeting his co-author Steven Spear in an executive leadership program at MIT and how it changed his own work. The DevOps Handbook co-author realized “there was something in common between agile, DevOps, lean, the Toyota Production System, safety culture, resilience engineering, and so much more — that they were all incomplete expressions of a larger whole.”

Gene and Steve explain how all these methodologies…

1. Make solving problems easier to do (what they call slowification)

2. Make the problems themselves easier to solve (simplification) and

3. Make it obvious that there are problems that demand attention and whether they’ve been seen and solved (amplification)

They talk about three layers of organizations where people create value. Layer 1 contains the technical objects being worked on. Layer 2 is tools and instrumentation. And Layer 3 contains the social circuitry. Really good leaders create, sustain, and continuously improve Layer 3, “the overlay of the processes, procedures, routines, and norms that enable people to do their work easily and well,” and this is what ultimately sets teams up for success. “When that circuitry is well wired, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” Gene and Steve write. “Too often, the parts don’t come together into an effective whole, likely because leaders massively underestimate the difficulty of synchronizing disparate functional specialties toward a common purpose.”

Technology of course runs through all these layers and is a huge part of most organizations’ social circuitry. We can either use technology to help us solve problems more effectively or use it in ways that create more problems or prevent us from solving problems.

But what about AI? The same rule applies. It’s a tool like any other, and one we don’t know everything about what it can do yet. In a lean organization, the ultimate objective is to create increasingly more value for customers (with increasingly less waste) and sustainable financial outcomes, all while creating more fulfilling work for employees. No aspect of the business can be ignored to meet that objective, including technology. If we can leverage new technologies to create more value and reduce wasted time, energy, and resources, then we’re headed in the right direction.

“[AI] is a cool tool, but let’s remember what it is,” Steve said in a webinar with LEI, “From Toyota to Tech, Wiring Organizations to Win.” It’s got no intelligence, it’s got no judgment, it’s got no soul. None of that. Compared to anything else, it has a prodigious memory… it’s very, very good at finding patterns.” For this reason, he encourages teams to “slowify” by learning how to use AI tools, where they apply, where they are useful, where they are not, and where they are destructive. Spear encourages AI enthusiasts to simplify by “testing the AI on little things at first so we get a handle on how it behaves before we start trying to use it on more complex things.”

AI has no intelligence, no judgment, no soul—it’s very good at finding patterns.

— Steve Spear, co-author, Wiring the Winning Organization

In the webinar “Building Communities that Learn: Lessons from the AI Frontier with Gene Kim,” Gene speaks with optimism about the possibilities. “I think AI is reshaping technology organizations. I think it’s going to shape every business organization. This is an opportunity for anyone trying to solve a problem to pair up with technologists and solve them in a way that is going to be faster and more fulfilling.” 

Ahead of the Lean Summit, LEI President Josh Howell echoes Kim’s sentiments. “I’m excited about the collaborations we’re seeing between business leaders in tech and lean practitioners. And to lean leaders, I would say get to know the technologists in your organization since the way you collaborate with them is changing. Experiment with ways you can incorporate and leverage new technologies.” Howell urges people to embrace AI tools while keeping human beings at the center of systems and work design.

This is an opportunity for anyone trying to solve a problem to pair up with technologists and solve them in a way that is going to be faster and more fulfilling.

— Gene Kim, Author, Researcher, Vibe Coder, DevOps Enthusiast, Founder of IT Revolution

LEI Senior Coach Tyson Heaton adds, “Tech is a component of your management layer. Like it or not, it’s a management system. How we structure it and use it is important. Lean is the appropriate path to good technology implementation.” LEI Senior Advisor Jim Morgan clearly lays out this path and offers principles to guide experimentation with AI in his Design Brief, “AI Might Change the Game, But People Still Build the Team”: 

“The principles Toyota shared with my co-author Jeff Liker and me over 20 years ago are worth seriously considering again in this totally new context:  

1. Seamlessly integrate technology into the development system — don’t treat it as a “bolt-on”.   

2. Customize the technology to fit your needs. Take the time to truly understand its implications.  

3. Start with right-sized tech, not king-sized.  

4. Use it to enhance people’s performance, not to eliminate them. Technology should be in the service of people, not people in the service of technology.   

5. Implement tech to improve your ability to deliver new value to your customer, not for its own sake.  

Join us in Houston, March 12-13 to hear Gene Kim keynote the Lean Summit 2026. Gene will be joined by more technology leaders like Guru Vasudeva, VP and CTO of Nationwide, and Jonny LeRoy, Senior VP and CTO at Grainger who will share their insights on leveraging lean thinking in tech for products and processes and how they’re using lean principles combined with new technologies for even greater impact.