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Project Managers Adopting Artificial Intelligence, But Many Still Lag Behind

Last Updated November 3, 2020

Group Of Asian and Multiethnic Business people working and brainstorming together with Polygonal brain shape of an artificial intelligence

Project management evolved from a need to effectively handle the challenges of ensuring a project team stays on task, on time and on budget. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the tools to ensure those goals are successfully met.

Organizations around the globe are putting AI to use. Gartner projected that AI will produce $2.9 trillion of business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity worldwide by 2021. It also reported that about 60% of businesses have already deployed AI.

That trend includes project management, where AI is leading to higher productivity and better quality. But that doesn’t mean a loss of jobs. 

“We will always have a need for highly skilled project managers,” Alison Bakken, senior vice president and global head of the technology program office at Thomson Reuters, said in the Project Management Institute’s 2019 “AI @ Work: New Projects, New Thinking” report. “I don’t see the technology taking that over.”

Top Technologies Used in Project Management

Project managers surveyed for the “AI @ Work” report said they currently use AI in about 23% of projects and expected that number to jump to 37% in the coming year.

Project managers use AI to streamline projects tasks and operations. The top technologies having the most impact on productivity, according to PMI’s research, are:

  • Robotic Process Automation – Mimics and automates human tasks
  • Reinforcement Learning – Enables software to learn in an interactive environment by trial and error using feedback from its own actions
  • Machine Learning – Computers learn through pattern detection, improving decisions in subsequent situations

In the area of quality, project managers said AI technologies having the most significant impact are:

  • Anti-bias solutions – Identifies bias in a range of AI algorithms
  • Expert systems – Emulates and mimics human intelligence, skills or behavior with expertise in a specific field, topic or skill
  • Knowledge-based systems – Understands context of data being processed and is used in problem-solving and supporting human learning, decision making and actions

A Need For Project Management Training

About 10% of all project managers in the PMI report said they rarely if ever practice what PMI calls the three tenets of a high Project Management Technology Quotient (PMTQ). Those tenets are an “always-on” curiosity about emerging methods for project delivery, all-inclusive leadership that includes people and machines, and a future-proof talent pool that keeps learning and encourages others to learn.

A lack of PMTQ puts project managers into the “laggard” category, according to PMI. It’s an organizational issue, with only 28% of those in the “laggards” group saying their organization provided them the right support to work with AI.

The report found the laggards far behind on areas such as knowledge-based systems, decision management, voice assistant, speech recognition, robotic process automation, virtual agents and graphic processing units.

An AI-First Culture

The large number of laggards not getting trained in project management and its latest technology tools is cause for concern. The AI revolution in business is coming quickly. A 2019 survey by the International Data Corporation (IDC) on AI Global Adoption Trends and Strategies found that two-thirds of the organizations surveyed see AI as so important that they are adopting an “AI First” culture.

In a press release on the survey, Ritu Jyoti, the program vice president for Artificial Intelligence Strategies at IDC, said: “Organizations that embrace AI will drive better customer engagements and have accelerated rates of innovation, higher competitiveness, higher margins and productive employees.”

In another sign of the accelerated pace of change now underway, Oxford Economics reported that the rapid innovations in automation, engineering, energy storage, artificial intelligence and machine learning are converging in robotics. They expect robots to take over 20 million manufacturing jobs by 2030.

Examples of AI in Project Management

The true test of any innovation in business is whether it adds value. In the case of AI, plenty of examples are there for people to consider, including two offered by PMI.

In the case of Chinese company Alibaba, AI has been used in a number of projects involving work at the company’s campus in Hangzhou. They include the use of facial cognition on the work campus, the Aliwork expert system that is trained to answer the most frequently asked questions from employees, and DingTalk, a natural language processing app that can translate messages between languages.

“AI can offload project managers from hosting meetings, writing emails of recording the meeting minutes,” said Stephen Xu, head of the project management office, Infrastructure Service BU, Alibaba Group.

In addition, PMI reported that Thomson Reuters has used AI in decision making and strategy development, which has led to more opportunity for employees to focus on value-adding tasks.  Bakken said AI “helps leaders become more effective, but it doesn’t replace them.”

If you are interested in learning more about project management training, visit our Certificate in Applied Project Management program page, or our Project Management resources section.  

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