Blog

AI’s Immediate Promise Possibilities

Projects have multiple use-cases where AI applications could be a help to both manager and project practitioner humans. However, at this point AI does not have the information, context, nuance, or sense of balance to run complex projects. There are too many variables, stakeholder handling topics, risks, and balancing within acceptable norms that humans haven’t yet figured out how they all work together in a formulaic way. And letting AI loose to hallucinate on how all those pieces could fit together might be an input for you to leverage. However, in my opinion the project realm should not be left solely to AI.

From numerous articles, some listed in the end notes, and from what I can currently cognate on from my own AI experiments, here are a few possible areas where AI could be of help in our project realms now.

Human Project Roles in in the time of AI

You may ask if AI can do all that, what else is there for humans to do?

The following are a few specialties and roles that humans are still very needed in both as manager and project practitioner. And there will likely be other important human tasks and roles that become apparent as we all progress and mature in this AI assistance landscape.

What human managers of project managers still should be doing.

    • Managing and supporting project management staff

    • Using their experience and expertise to probe problem areas

    • Making decisions on how to balance the project portfolio, programs, project loads based on 

      information from AI as well as taking into account the personalities, business demands, and project environment nuances that at this point are not in an AI application’s data set.

    • Putting increased efforts into alignment and planning for increased effectiveness and efficiency in project operations.

What human project practitioners still should be doing.

    • Supplying the information via prompts or other application inputs and requests for AI to supply drafts of the needed project management/scrum artifacts.

    • Reviewing, validating, and updating AI drafts and other artifacts to be accurate based on broader human experience, and the context of your project realm.

    • Using their experience and expertise to probe project problem areas

    • Making recommendations on how to improve AI usage, the project environment, AND human roles with the broader perspective for better project and environment productivity not available with AI today.

Considerations

Benefits

Ask yourself, what are the potential benefits of leveraging AI in your project environment? If the promise is not there for your use cases, you may want to ask others how they are using AI. Assess how your competitors may be using AI. But definitely do not ignore AI. At the least, keep watching it and assess regularly if/how you could leverage it or change the way you use it today.

Investment

Is your organization willing and able to take on the AI implementation cost and execution? Is your organization open to a large investment to train and develop your own AI on your data? Or will your AI needs be met by utilizing a chat or other tool (with public or private data)?

Reasons & Impacts

What is your reason for rolling out AI in your organization? Is it to streamline and cut all costs… at all costs? Is it to be an aide for managers? For project practitioners? Whatever the reason, here are some decisions that the organization should be prepared to deal with and have a viable plan for. Specifically, answering questions in the following topic areas may serve you well if you consider them at the start of your AI efforts.

• What is your resource plan in light of AI assistance? Are you planning on keeping the same head count, downsizing due to AI streamlining, or up sizing to provide better human service with the help of AI? Do you have a plan to modify job descriptions that may keep changing as you use more AI? What kind and timing of communications are you planning to use to inform your company, your project team members about any AI changes?

    • Are your product and service offerings going to remain the same with AI in your organization? Will the offerings increase or decrease? Will the quality of your offerings change? And how could they change by leveraging more AI assistance? How could they change by leveraging a possible increase in human time to better provide higher quality or better engage with customers and clients? Is communication with your clients about your AI usage needed and/or beneficial?

    • Who in your organization, and what levels/functions in your organization, or your project team would be of help to think through possible AI and human changes?

AI Tool Competitiveness

There are many AI tools in varied applications including as browser chatbots, specialized applications for specific purposes or industry focus, or some solutions are being built into suites of integrated products and connections. 
The competition among AI offerings continues to be aggressive and fast paced to achieve the top spots. The site artificial analysis₁ provides an ongoing updated set of dashboards that puts top Large Language Models (LLM) competitors side by side for you to compare, at least as a general initial reference, to find what is important to you.

Example of Tool Relevance

Here is one example to provide some context about why you may care about finding the right tool for you. AI can sometimes go on its own fictional journeys called hallucinations. In a public demonstration on 60 minutes in 2022 Google’s Bard (an earlier AI chat now retired) recommended five books which were not real as references to answer an inflation question. ₂

The Google Gemini version that followed appeared to be greatly scaled back to “just providing the facts.” I found that the Gemini available via their free training was very factual and was marginally better than a good internet search in my opinion. It repeatedly told me that the information I was searching for could not be found. (I believe it couldn’t be found as “absolute truth.”) On the other hand, I found that Open.ai 4.0 did give me answers (although they may not have been perfectly accurate) to those same questions that I could at least use as a starting point for further research. 

Bottom line: These are decisions for you to make based on your needs and preferences.

My Take

There is so much promise in AI to automate and streamline work as well as to significantly raise the bar in quality products, services, and human engagement. 

How the power of AI will be used either to enrich the lives of management, workers, clients, and the public with leveraged human/AI combinations, OR to simply streamline processes and cut out everything over and above “Minimum Viable Products (MVP)” is yet to be determined.

For you to realize the promises of AI that you may want to see take place at your organization, or on your team, I would point out two additional areas for you to consider.

    • If your organization is chaotic in its data management or standards and processes, using AI on your current data sets and processes is not likely to provide anything more… and may in fact create more chaos. Cleaning up your data and processes should come as a first step.    • There are multiple study findings that point to AI not being ready for a full load of work without supervision and guidance. See one healthcare example conclusion here.₃ AI in my opinion is not ready now, and it is questionable if it would ever be ready to run complex projects from end to end. AI has a place, but humans have the primary role to manage project realms for the benefit of … humans, and meet human needs and expectations in ways that AI cannot.

Next Steps

1. Assess your organization’s goals for how AI could help your people, your projects, your teams, programs, portfolios, and your organization (list your applicable use cases).

2. Consider taking in some of the PMI AI articles and webinars for how PMs are using AI. ₄

3. Try different AI solutions using public data, or test in sandboxes to assess the type of AI tool that you/your organization is comfortable with. Reference my example at the bottom of the Considerations section above to help you find your AI preferences and needs.

4. If you want the latest greatest AI LLMs, track their advances on the artificialanalysis.ai site and match the tool strengths to your use cases.

5. Assess your organization readiness and what you need to do and would actually plan to do to implement AI in relevant applications and use cases… or not.

The AI decisions and tools you use or don’t use are of course yours to make. 

I hope you will look into the options and what it would take so that you can make an informed decision that works well for your project realm. You can always ping me for help to work through this process.

1 “Comparison of AI Models across Quality, Performance, Price | Artificial Analysis.” Artificialanalysis.ai, artificialanalysis.ai/models.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models

2 “194K Views · 2.6K Reactions | Google’s Chatbot Failed 60 Minutes’ Fact Check | Google’s Bard Chatbot Recommended and Then Summarized Five Books. 60 Minutes Checked, and the Books Weren’t Real. In the AI Industry, This Type Of… | by 60 Minutes | Facebook.” Facebook.com, 2022, www.facebook.com/60minutes/videos/googles-chatbot-failed-60-minutes-fact-check/2198479880340248/. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.

3 Chelli, Mikaël, et al. “Hallucination Rates and Reference Accuracy of ChatGPT and Bard for Systematic Reviews: Comparative Analysis.” Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 26, 22 May 2024, p. e53164, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38776130/, https://doi.org/10.2196/53164.

4 “How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing Project Management.” Online.champlain.edu, 17 Dec. 2024, online.champlain.edu/blog/how-artificial-intelligence-revolutionizing-project-management.

https://online.champlain.edu/blog/how-artificial-intelligence-revolutionizing-project-management