'Should We?' vs. 'Can We?' – AI Ethics in Project Management

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Artificial Intelligence   Ethics  

It is with a variety of feelings that we are accepting/despising the addition of artificial intelligence into our list of project management tools. Depending on who you are, how you enable it, and the concerns you may have about using it, AI is a new and evolving creature that we cannot quite figure out without feeling both exhilaration and dread at the same time.

It can schedule meetings, predict deadlines, automate basic documentation, and even provide Gantt charts if we let it. It keeps finding new inroads into IT project management tasks and associated deliverables. But as with many aspiring and risky technologies, we ask the same questions of both—“Can we?” and “Should we?”—when we look at its deployment possibilities.

There are many reasons for this debate. Just as we could use AI to evaluate our team’s productivity by analyzing keystroke and data manipulation intel, it doesn’t mean that we should. Even though we could have AI review stakeholder feedback in less than 30 seconds doesn’t mean that we should have it take a look at every personal email on the system over the past five, 10 or 20 years.

This is where the ethics of using AI come into play—balancing and navigating these issues while embracing risk management and common sense. Let’s open up the suitcases of these concerns and look at why …

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