Team Topologies as the 'infrastructure for agency' with humans and AI

Key takeaways

- Organizations that already organize for bounded agency in humans are well-suited to adopting AI effectively and humanely
- Trust in teams and AI is founded on bounded agency that provides clarity
- Team Topologies provides vital patterns and principles for establishing agency
- Avoid unbounded access to data and other resources by AI tools and agents
- Empower teams of humans to be effective stewards of AI using Team Topologies

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 / Manuel Pais - 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.

Transcript

1. Team Topologies as the 'infrastructure for agency' with humans and AI Matthew Skelton Co-author of Team Topologies & Adapt Together CEO/CTO at Conflux matthewskelton.com K310 Northern DevOps Conference 2026, Leeds | 19 May 2026
2. 2 Question: “How should we organize AI agents and humans for effective value delivery?”
3. 3 Organizations that already organize for bounded agency in humans are well-suited to adopting AI effectively and humanely.
4. 4 A focus on bounded agency clarifies mission and focus up and down the organization: what value are providing, and to whom?
5. 5 Leaders need: focused behavioural ‘levers’, proven ‘fast flow’ techniques from Team Topologies, active innovation detection and diffusion, and an engaging dynamic of cross-group sharing and standards uplift via high-quality content infrastructure.
6. Matthew Skelton empowering and augmenting teams using technology Co-author of Team Topologies Co-author of Adapt Together CEO/CTO at Conflux matthewskelton.com 6
7. 7 Team Topologies Second Edition https://teamtopologies.com/book Organizing Business and Technology for Fast Flow of Value By Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais Second Edition: September 2025 10 new case studies from around the world
8. 8 Team Topologies paraphrased (by me) “Given the need for ongoing stewardship of long-lived services, how can we realistically arrange the flow of value to be rapid, safe, and sustainable?”
9. Stuart Winter-Tear 9 “... Team Topologies [...] offers something Agentic AI desperately needs - but cannot invent on its own: Clear boundaries, Stable interfaces, Aligned domains, A culture of collaborative ownership. [Team Topologies is] … the infrastructure for agency itself.” https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stuart-winter-tear_orgs-that-have-worked-out-ho w-to-empower-activity-7339513909151719425-teiT/ AI Product Advisor to PE | Author of UNHYPED
10. 10 infrastructure for agency: rules, principles, guardrails that empower groups of humans and AI Agents to be effective stewards of value flow
11. 13 Software delivery Charity fundraising Marketing Accounting Legal services 13
12. 14 Software delivery Charity fundraising Marketing Accounting Legal services Knowledge work 14
13. 15 Problem: Why do 80% of firms report no benefit from AI https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/ai_productivity_survey/ and https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836
14. 16 Problem: How does the COO sleep soundly at night with 10k AI Agents operating 24x7?
15. 17 Problem: How can the CISO reason about security risks from Agentic AI?
16. 18 Problem: How can we align costs to value streams for simpler Exec Board reporting?
17. 19 What key principles has the IT / software industry learned since around 1998 (or before)?
18. Instead of another ‘[technology]-first’ initiative - leading to more C-suite distrust - let’s start with known success factors for value delivery with humans 20
19. 21 0. start with outcomes
20. 1. avoid hand-offs 2. align incentives for ongoing value delivery 3. protect fidelity of concepts 4. cognitively-scoped stewardship 5. actively diffuse learning and innovation 22
21. 1. avoid hand-offs 2. align incentives for ongoing value delivery 3. fidelity of concepts 4. cognitively-scoped stewardship 5. actively diffuse learning and innovation 23
22. 1. avoid hand-offs 2. align incentives for ongoing value delivery 3. fidelity of concepts 4. cognitively-scoped stewardship 5. actively diffuse learning and innovation 24
23. 1. avoid hand-offs 2. align incentives for ongoing value delivery 3. protect fidelity of concepts 4. cognitively-scoped stewardship 5. actively diffuse learning and innovation 25
24. 1. avoid hand-offs 2. align incentives for ongoing value delivery 3. fidelity of concepts 4. cognitively-scoped stewardship 5. actively diffuse learning and innovation 26
25. 1. avoid hand-offs 2. align incentives for ongoing value delivery 3. fidelity of concepts 4. cognitively-scoped stewardship 5. actively diffuse learning and innovation 27
26. 1. avoid hand-offs 2. align incentives for ongoing value delivery 3. protect fidelity of concepts 4. cognitively-scoped stewardship 5. actively diffuse learning and innovation 28
27. 29 How can key principles from Team Topologies (and the whole DevOps movement) help to shape organizations for AI and answer the tricky C-suite questions?
28. ❏ Trust in teams and AI is founded on bounded agency that provides clarity ❏ Team Topologies provides vital patterns and principles for establishing agency ❏ Avoid unbounded access to data and other resources by AI tools and agents ❏ Empower teams of humans to be effective stewards of AI using Team Topologies 30
29. Trust in teams and AI is founded on bounded agency that provides clarity 31
30. clear team purpose and remit for ‘organizational observability’ 32
31. ‘Organizational observability’ tools TeamForm - teamform.co 33 TeamOS - teamos.is explicitly using Team Topologies principles and patterns
32. Amanda Laucher Graham 34 “[AI] governance cannot live only in policies and review boards. It has to live in system architecture to scale. … If you are building visibility into what is running, encoding risk appetite in enforceable thresholds, and giving your agents identities and traceability, you are probably ahead of where most organizations are today.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-governance-engineering-discipline-amanda-laucher-graham-ajgfe/ Head of AI and Fortune 100 Advisor
33. Team Topologies provides vital patterns and principles for establishing agency 35
34. Ongoing stewardship of long-lived value streams: “stream-aligned teams” 36
35. Tom Peperkamp 38 “... The organizations poised to win [with Agentic AI] are not necessarily those with the most advanced models, but those whose operating models are already built for trust, clarity, and bounded autonomy … Team Topologies provides the blueprint for creating the bounded autonomy and clear interfaces that agents need to thrive.” https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tompeperkamp_agentic-ai-is-coming-but-it-wont-b e-the-activity-7337585782481711105-hzy0/
36. Avoid unbounded access to data and other resources by AI tools and agents 40
37. “Just grant access to all data stores and APIs for the Agentic AI” 41
38. “Just grant access to all data stores and APIs for the Agentic AI” 42 Really?!
39. 43 https://genai.owasp.org/llmrisk/llm062025-excessive-agency/ “Excessive Agency can lead to a broad range of impacts across the confidentiality, integrity and availability spectrum… ” OWASP GenAI
40. 44 Security boundaries (if done well) protect both data and domain fidelity
41. team cognitive load as a design principle 45
42. Razi Alqasem 46 “A context window is … the cognitive load boundary of an AI system. [...] Exceed it, and the agent … starts forgetting. It loses coherence. It hallucinates connections that don’t exist and misses connections that do. This means that every principle Team Topologies teaches about managing cognitive load for human teams maps directly onto designing effective agent architectures” https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7429604698107703297/ Director, Product Engineering @ Verato
43. Empower teams of humans to be effective stewards of AI using Team Topologies 49
44. team types and team interaction modes - as a diagnostic language 51
45. Veronica Stewart 52 “As AI accelerates development and analysis, companies will increasingly need visibility into things like: domain boundaries, ownership clarity, cross-team dependencies, platform bottlenecks, architectural coupling The clearer the system is for humans, the more effectively AI can operate within it.” https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7438180828662263808/ AI Enablement & Product Operations Leader
46. But… we need something else too 53
47. 54 Multiple, independent flows, fractally Flow of value
48. 55 Multiple, independent flows, fractally Flow of value Pockets of good practices and approaches
49. 56 Multiple, independent flows, fractally Flow of value Active knowledge diffusion
50. 57 Active diffusion of knowledge across team boundaries
51. 58 internal conferences guilds Communities of Practice lunch & learn public blogs
52. 59 internaltechconf.com Internal Tech Conferences Victoria Morgan-Smith and Matthew Skelton https://www.infoq.com/articles/book-review-internal-tech-conferences/
53. 60 Innovation & Practices Enabling team
55. 62 “The way that the Conflux crew used their active knowledge diffusion approach to seek out and champion good practices was a real revelation to us at TELUS and helped to shift thinking around how we innovate and share successes.” – Steven Tannock, Director, Architecture (Platform Technology & Tools) at TELUS Digital
56. 63 “This initiative around internal conferences has been the single most effective thing to align business and technology that I have seen in this organization” – Murray Hennessey, CEO, (UK retail co)
57. Derek Waldron, Chief Analytics Officer at JPMorgan Chase 64 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial- services/our-insights/jpmorgan-chases-derek- waldron-on-building-an-ai-first-bank-culture “We didn’t mandate the use of LLM Suite by anybody. Instead, we used an opt-in approach … There was a little bit of a fear of missing out. That social dynamic helped create a culture of adoption.”
58. “friendly FOMO” 65
59. 66 Creating a deep ‘mechanical sympathy’ with the technology to navigate opportunities and limitations
60. 68 Leaders need: focused behavioural ‘levers’, proven ‘fast flow’ techniques from Team Topologies, active innovation detection and diffusion, and an engaging dynamic of cross-group sharing and standards uplift via high-quality content infrastructure.
61. 69 adapttogether.info Create alignment, trust, engagement, and awareness across your organization whilst delivering at speed.
63. Summary 77
64. 78 Question: “How should we organize AI agents and humans for effective value delivery?”
65. 79 0. start with outcomes
66. 1. avoid hand-offs 2. align incentives for ongoing value delivery 3. protect fidelity of concepts 4. cognitively-scoped stewardship 5. actively diffuse learning and innovation 80
67. ❏ Trust in teams and AI is founded on bounded agency that provides clarity ❏ Team Topologies provides vital patterns and principles for establishing agency ❏ Avoid unbounded access to data and other resources by AI tools and agents ❏ Empower teams of humans to be effective stewards of AI using Team Topologies 81
68. Stuart Winter-Tear 82 “... Team Topologies [...] offers something Agentic AI desperately needs - but cannot invent on its own: Clear boundaries, Stable interfaces, Aligned domains, A culture of collaborative ownership. [Team Topologies is] … the infrastructure for agency itself.” https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stuart-winter-tear_orgs-that-have-worked-out-ho w-to-empower-activity-7339513909151719425-teiT/ AI Product Advisor to PE | Author of UNHYPED
69. 83 infrastructure for agency: rules, principles, guardrails that empower groups of humans and AI Agents to be effective stewards of value flow
70. 84 Organizations that already organize for bounded agency in humans are well-suited to adopting AI effectively and humanely.
71. 85 A focus on bounded agency clarifies mission and focus up and down the organization: what value are providing, and to whom?
72. 86 Leaders need: focused behavioural ‘levers’, proven ‘fast flow’ techniques from Team Topologies, active innovation detection and diffusion, and an engaging dynamic of cross-group sharing and standards uplift via high-quality content infrastructure.
73. 87 WE CAN DO THIS! 💪
74. Scale out adoption and awareness of Team Topologies across the enterprise: Academy, enterprise content license, bulk book purchases, TT Success Toolkit™ 88 ➡ Get started: teamtopologies.com/scale
75. 89 adapttogether.info Create alignment, trust, engagement, and awareness across your organization whilst delivering at speed.
76. let’s work together 90 matthewskelton.com
77. Resources 91
78. 92 Resources Book: Team Topologies 2nd Ed https://teamtopologies.com/book By Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais Organizing Business and Technology for Fast Flow of Value Second Edition: September 2025
79. 93 Resources Book: Internal Tech Conferences https://internaltechconf.com/ By Victoria Morgan-Smith and Matthew Skelton Accelerating Multi-team Learning
80. 94 Resources Book: Unbundling the Enterprise https://itrevolution.com/product/unbundling-the-enterprise/ By Stephen Fishman, Matt McLarty APIs, Optionality, and the Science of Happy Accidents (Includes value dynamics calculations)
81. 95 Resources Book: The Value Flywheel Effect https://itrevolution.com/product/the-value-flywheel-effect/ By David Anderson, Mark McCann, Michael O’Reilly Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud
82. 96 Resources Book: Empowered Agile Transformation https://www.alexandrastokes.com/store/p/empowered-agi le-transformation-beyond-the-framework By Alex Stokes Beyond the Framework
83. 97 Resources Book: Product Operations https://www.productoperations.com/ By Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles How successful companies build better products at scale
84. 98 Resources Book: Empowered https://www.svpg.com/books/empowered-ordinary-peopl e-extraordinary-products/ By Marty Cagan with Chris Jones Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
85. let’s work together 99 matthewskelton.com