Stand-ups used to be one of the simplest and most effective rituals in product development. Fifteen minutes, everyone standing up, quick alignment, then back to work.

Lets fast-forward a decade, and for many teams, stand-ups have turned into tedious reporting sessions. One by one, people recite their updates:

• “Yesterday I worked on X”

• “Today I’ll work on Y”

• “No blockers (or maybe you have)”

By the time the last person finishes, most of the team has drifted off dreaming about their weekend plans, and the actual purpose of the meeting, solving problems together, has been lost.

What we’ll cover today:

1. Why stand-ups drifted into status theater

2. How AI can take over the reporting work

3. What a reimagined stand-up could look like

4. When daily stand-ups are still worth it (and when they’re not)

Stand-ups are awesome! (when they work)

Stand-ups were designed for alignment and unblockers. It's a way for teams to share knowledge, solve problems together and plan ahead. But chances are pretty high that you don't relate to any of these statements. So how did we end up here?

1. Reporting does not equal Alignment: We already track work in Jira, Linear, Trello, Notion, GitHub. Despite this stand-ups typically drift towards just reporting. Which in itself is not bad, but it leaves little time for much else.

2. Distributed teams — Remote and hybrid setups make it harder to keep things short and sharp. The ad-hoc coffee chats and syncs happen, albeit less often and with lower visibility over DMs in Slack or Teams (or the occasional PR)

3. Status expectations — Leaders often lean on stand-ups as a substitute for visibility. Instead of trusting the tools, they ask for spoken updates.

How AI can be used responsibly to solve (parts of this) -> spoiler, it's still a human problem

Among all the half-baked use-cases for AI that we see every week, this is actually a good example of when it can be used as a natural extension to solve a real problem.

An AI agent can already:

• Pull yesterday’s commits from GitHub.

• Summarize open tickets and their progress in Jira/Linear.

• Flag where work is blocked in review.

• Even cross-check customer feedback to highlight risks.

In other words, everything we burn time reporting verbally can be automated.

The role of humans in the stand-up isn’t reporting what happened. It’s deciding what to do about it.

But even after all that "AI-gospel" it's important to remember at the core if it, this is a human problem. You need to align your team around what a stand-up is actually about. Inefficient stand-ups are never a symptom of poor tooling but rather poor collaboration culture.

Because what should stand-ups actually be used for?

If AI handles the reporting, the stand-up has room to breathe again. It can go back to being useful.

• Problem-solving: “Two tasks are blocked on the same API. How do we coordinate?”

• Forward-looking planning: “Looks like this feature is at risk of slipping — do we cut scope or move the deadline?”

• Knowledge sharing: “Here’s how I fixed the nasty auth bug yesterday.”

• Team building: A chance to connect as humans, not just as Jira tickets.

That shift transforms the meeting from “three-question theater” into a real team conversation.

Do you need stand-ups?

Here’s the contrarian take: maybe not.

If AI generates a daily digest with updates and blockers, you might not need everyone together every single day. For some teams, a twice-weekly sync plus async AI updates is more effective.

The cadence should fit the complexity of the work, not tradition. Daily stand-ups make sense in high-velocity, fast-changing environments. But for stable feature development, forcing everyone into a daily ritual might be wasteful.

At the end of day you must ask the question; "how do I make sure my team is aligned?"

Perhaps it is through a daily stand-up, perhaps it's smaller syncs for the people that need to discuss blockers + a follow-up for visibility in Slack. Or maybe you should only do async. The rules for remote and hybrid teams are slightly different but you need to figure out what works for you.

Final comment on AI in stand-ups

AI doesn’t make stand-ups irrelevant. It makes them worth doing again.

By automating the status updates, teams can focus on what humans are best at: thinking together, solving problems, and planning ahead.

The stand-up of the future isn’t everyone reading from their to-do list. It’s walking out with clarity, alignment, and maybe even a little energy for the day ahead.