Speaking & Teaching

Bring me into the room

I talk about what AI does to work, and what leaders have to do about it. Not the tools. What changes underneath them.

Featured talk

Evolving the RTE: What AI Can Do, Why Humans Matter More

SAFe & AI Summit · San Diego · September 2026

What happens to the role when the artifacts get cheap. Where the leadership work moves to, and why it gets harder, not easier.

Three things I argue

The artifact was never the value. The capacity was.

Write, summarize and structure save you time. Prepare, analyze and think change how you work. Most people stop after the first three.

When the artifacts get cheap, the leadership work does not disappear. It gets harder, and it stops being optional.

Topics

What I speak about

AI and capacity

What AI actually gives you is time and thinking room. Most organizations spend it on more output. The talk is about spending it on leadership instead.

AI-native ways of working

Bolting AI onto the old process gets you the old results, faster. What has to change underneath, and how you can tell whether it has.

Scaling agility without losing the humans

Every scaling framework has the same failure mode, and it is never the framework.

Before that

Stop Spinning Your Team's Wheels

Agile2019, plus an article for the Agile Alliance the same year.

Agile Transformation Summit

Conference chair. Six hundred attendees, thirty sessions, a hundred and seventy companies, put on by twenty eight volunteers organized as eight Scrum teams. We ran it as an ART.

Bio

Take what you need

Short bio · about 55 words

Alex Kanaan is Head of Learning and Enablement at Outcomes360. He has led how work changes from the inside, at the United Nations, USAA and Marathon Petroleum, and as a consultant through Avanade. He teaches AI-native ways of working, speaks about capacity and leadership, and builds the assessment tools that measure whether any of it worked.

Long bio · about 160 words

Alex Kanaan is Head of Learning and Enablement at Outcomes360, a consultancy focused on human-centered AI. His argument is short. AI creates capacity. What you do with that capacity is leadership, and that part does not automate.

He has spent his career on how work changes. ERP implementations for oil, manufacturing and government clients with Accenture. Delivery and bid work across Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Logica, then global applications at the United Nations. Enterprise architecture at Avanade, the Accenture and Microsoft joint venture. Eight years inside USAA as an agile coach and then a lead portfolio manager. Then Release Train Engineer for an analytics train at Marathon Petroleum, which is where the capacity argument stopped being a theory.

He builds what he teaches. AIQ, his AI-Native Quotient assessment, is live and public, and anyone can take it.

Alex holds an Executive MBA from the University of Bradford, is an AI-Native Advanced SAFe Practice Consultant, and is a Certified AI-Native Trainer. He speaks and teaches on AI, people, and the future of work.

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Tell me about the room

Six questions. The last two are the ones I actually need.