When googling about Artificial Intelligence in Project Management you’ll find loads of articles talking about how AI will revolutionize and transform project management, how it will automate processes, etc., and how it possibly will eliminate the project manager role all together.
Reading most of those articles, you are getting the idea that AI indeed has the capabilities that we all know already — processing large amounts of data quickly, finding patterns in data, learning from it, making predictions. It is also clear that the project management practice where capabilities of forecasting project scenarios and outcomes, predicting the impact from risks and issues, estimating work, etc. are critical building blocks, is an obvious use case for the application of AI. There is therefore no doubt that AI will have a significant footprint in the project management area.
The most important question though is what it will do to project management from an organizational point of view, to established processes, methodologies, frameworks, etc.
Will AI just be another tool that will make the project manager’s life easier, just like Microsoft Project, Jira, Slack, etc.? Project managers appreciate such tools just like accountants appreciate tools like Microsoft Excel which made their life in many ways significantly easier.
Will AI be like a new project management methodology, just like Agile? Agile methods had a significant impact on project management, especially in technology/software development projects, which also led to new software tools (e.g. Atlassian Jira) and required a new mindset for adoption.
The impact of AI in project management however will be much broader and truly disruptive. AI will not be just a new tool nor just a new methodology, instead we can expect that it will fundamentally redefine the project management practice.
