Is Project Management Being Replaced by AI?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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Topics: Artificial Intelligence

In doing research for another article that I wrote on artificial intellignece, I asked Google for some information. When it provided it, it referenced a Gartner report that suggested that 80% of project management tasks will be eliminated by AI by 2030. Well, that sounded like a challenge to me…so I looked into it a bit more.

It turns out that this was a rather old claim, dating from March 2019, and was intended to drive attendance at an event. Given its age, and the fact that it felt a bit like clickbait, I was initially going to discount it. But the fact that it is still getting exposure thanks to Google’s AI algorithms means that it’s still relevant.

So, what do we think?
Does the percentage sound right to you? It sounds way too high to me if I’m honest. Dig into the details a bit more, and the claim suggested that AI will take on “traditional PM functions such as data collection, tracking and reporting.” Well, yes, I can see AI doing all those, potentially before 2030. But let’s hang on a minute.

Even in 2019, those weren’t the core parts of a project manager’s role, even if they had been traditional aspects of project management. And they certainly didn’t (and don’t) account for 80% of the work. I would like to go into more detail, but the rest of that news release shifts to project portfolio …

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