AI as an Analytical Assistant to Improve Team Performance

This is the first post in a series showing how AI can become a real partner in your sprints. In this post, we will focus on the analytical side — how AI helps you see what’s really going on in the team and discover the actual bottlenecks. In the next post, we’ll dive into team dynamics and communication.

The Scrum Master Role is Changing — and AI Opens New Doors

The main role of a Scrum Master is to help the team improve. It doesn’t matter what title you use in your organization — Scrum Master, Team Lead, Agile Team Leader — when you lead a team, your responsibility is not just to manage tasks, but to help the team become better day by day.

This is not an easy task. Sometimes, even when you do all the things you’ve been taught — retrospectives, charts, metrics — something still feels missing. 

This perspective aligns with AgileSparks’ Intelligent Flow Way, an evolving approach that integrates AI as a thinking partner to support transparency, learning, and continuous improvement.

This is exactly where AI comes in and opens new possibilities that you couldn’t reach just by observation and gut feeling.

I’m not talking about magic. I’m talking about practical, accessible tools that make the team’s picture clearer and give you a real way to lead continuous improvement.

AI as an Analytical Assistant — Seeing What’s Really Happening in the Team

One of the most effective ways to use AI is to upload screenshots of your team’s key charts and metrics and ask the AI to analyze them. Many Scrum Masters I work with face a point where they have data, but it’s hard to understand the real story behind it.

Before we get into it, two technical notes:

1. When I say “AI tool,” I don’t refer to a specific one. It could be GPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, or any other tool you choose. This is not a tool recommendation.
2. About data security — if you have an approved enterprise AI tool, use it. If not, be careful not to share sensitive data. All examples in this post refer to cautious use.

Three key charts for every Scrum Master:

• Burndown Chart — shows the pace of progress against the sprint plan and how well the team handles unexpected scope changes.
• Cycle Time — measures how long it takes for each work item to go through the process, helping to increase feedback speed. It’s considered a core team metric.
• Velocity — tracks the team’s work completion rate over time and helps improve forecast accuracy.

Burndown helps understand if the pace is right, Cycle Time reveals bottlenecks, and Velocity improves future planning. But if you don’t measure, you will never know if you are really improving.

AI as an Insight Generator — Understanding Why, Not Just What Happened

Here is where AI starts to bring real value beyond the charts. A simple screenshot of a chart combined with a precise prompt can give you immediate insights into how the team performed in the last sprint. Often, the basic “what happened” analysis turns on a light you didn’t expect.

It’s not complicated — upload the chart, ask the right question, and AI will return answers like:

• Did we keep a steady pace, or did we push most work to the end?
• Which tasks took the longest?
• Were there gaps between planning and execution?

This is excellent material for a retrospective discussion. I recommend starting with simple cases — insights based on things the team already knows, to build trust in the process.

The real leap comes when you look at trends over time. You’ll see that AI can point out patterns that repeat, even when we’ve gotten used to ignoring them. These trends are the real foundation for improvement and keep you from falling back into the same old clichés.

A Word About Prompts — Start Building Your Own Library

Prompts are how you communicate with AI. Like any conversation, what you ask is what you get. I suggest every Scrum Master start building a personal prompt library that works.

Don’t think you’ll remember a good prompt — write it down. Also, don’t be afraid to use AI itself to improve your questions. Ask it: “How can I phrase this better?” This is how you build a personal work tool that gets stronger sprint by sprint.

This article was developed and written by Oded Tamir, edited and presented with the assistance of GPT.