Research Webinar: Your Questions on AI, Answered Part 1

December 2, 2024 | by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

The majority of the questions that I did not have time to respond to during the live Q&A after our research webinar on Nov. 19 concerned the role of AI in project management. (If you did not attend the webinar, the recorded version is available here for free download.)

Attendees had questions that ranged from the sweeping (Will AI will change the forms of projects in the world?) to the personal (Will it take my job?) and the practical (Give an example of AI for project management such as AI notes for meetings or other applications). I don’t presume to be an AI expert, but there are plenty of others who are, and masses of content – for example, on the PMI AI Impact site—so the practical questions are being addressed by others.

As for the big questions, we’ve previously written about the human role in AI-assisted project management, and if you lift your nose from the practical details, there’s also a lot of very smart analysis of AI’s world-changing capacities, for example in The Harvard Business Review.

As for losing your job: that depends on you! The fact that we had more questions about a technology than about the focus of the webinar—which was resource management—just highlighted one of the points I stressed in the webinar, which was that high performance organizations focus less on tools and tech then they do on the human side of projects. Ironically, one of the biggest success factors for working with AI comes down to writing clear and meaningful prompts … so in the end, it’s all about communication. Again. Check out our 2023 research on the top skills and practices for the future roles in PM here.

There’s no escaping the importance of human inputs to technology, and so, the better we are at resource management, the better off we’ll be in the long run, with or without AI.

That said, we’ll be drilling down into tools and practices for AI in the PMO in our 2025 research, so keep a lookout for the research launch early next year.

Next week, I’ll respond to the questions I received about resource management and agile practices.