BONUS When the Team Becomes the Operating System for AI With Marko Taipale

BONUS: When the Team Becomes the Operating System for AI — Marko Taipale on the Twin Project at Solita

Most teams trying to "use AI" end up with fast individuals and a slower system. Marko Taipale ran a two-year experiment at Solita that suggests the real bottleneck isn't the tool — it's the team's operating model. In this conversation, Vasco and Marko walk through the Twin Project with ISS Finland — two teams, same ERP pricing tool, one classical agile, one with generative AI in the room — and the lessons that became the CollabAI framework.

The Twin Project — Two Teams, Same Product, One With AI in the Room

"We had a luxury of: do whatever you want with AI, please get at least the same results, towards the same goal."

 

In 2024, Marko's team at Solita was set up as the counterpart to an existing Scrum team building an ERP pricing tool for ISS Finland. Same product mission, two different operating models. The first days were chaotic and exploratory — the team tried over 120 AI tools, built a custom GPT to act as a stand-in product owner, and even sent a virtual assistant to sit silently in the other team's meetings so nobody from Marko's team had to attend. The framework grew out of what kept working, not from a plan written upfront.

"Fast Individuals, Slow System" — Why Buying Licenses Doesn't Fix the Bottleneck

"If you don't change your structures, AI won't do anything faster. The only thing that gets faster is the queues between your decision-making gates."

 

The line from Marko's book lands hard once you have seen it inside a team. A Copilot license speeds up the individual — and then the individual sits and waits for the rest of the system: reviews, handoffs, refinement, stakeholder meetings. Those queues are exactly what AI accelerates, and the team feels even more frustrated than before. The real intervention is upstream, in how the team shares context and makes decisions together. Without that, AI just makes the existing inefficiency more obvious.

Drifting in the Solution Space — Why Sense-Making Has to Happen Together

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