BONUS From AI Curiosity to Practical Project Tools With William Davis

BONUS: From AI Curiosity to Practical Project Tools With William Davis

AI becomes useful when it moves from generic answers into the daily work of solving real problems. In this BONUS episode, William Davis shares how he started building his own AI-assisted project management tools, what went wrong when the code grew too fast, and how Scrum Masters can use AI more carefully at individual, team, and project levels.

When AI Stops Being a Curiosity

"I really need to get a handle on how to productively use AI in my job."

 

William's shift started with a familiar problem: release plans are full of uncertainty, but stakeholders still need to understand what might happen and when. Instead of handcrafting uncertain delivery ranges in Excel, William used AI to build a desktop application that created probabilistic Gantt charts. In his work, these were not traditional command-and-control schedules. They were release plans that showed stakeholders a realistic range of possible delivery dates, making uncertainty visible instead of hiding it behind a false promise.

The Euphoria and the Crash

"Anybody can prompt an app into existence, but if you want an app that is actually enterprise-worthy, it does take a little bit of software engineering knowledge to know what questions to ask."

 

The first experience felt almost magical: ask questions, get code, assemble the pieces, and see a working application appear. But the magic faded when William kept extending the tool and the code started breaking in familiar ways. The AI forgot previous decisions, repeated mistakes, and produced a growing mass of tangled code. The lesson was direct: AI can move fast, but it still needs architecture, tests, and software engineering judgment. Without that, teams can build quickly and still end up with something hard to use, hard to maintain, and hard to trust.

AI as a Partner Inside the Tool

"The collaboration has a third partner, the AI."

 

William's work expanded from one application to several tools for forecasting, story mapping, release planning, and budgeting. The more interesting change was not only using AI to build tools, but building tools that could connect to AI while people used them. Through <a style="text-decoration: none;" href