We Need to Push AI Boundaries

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.

  Artificial Intelligence   Strategy  

Up until this point, the use of artificial intelligence in project management has been limited. It’s been about automating administration, driving workflows, and improving data analysis capabilities. These are all perfectly reasonable use cases, and they add value. But they’re, well…a bit boring. They’re not going to get many people excited about AI (although I’ll admit to being a fan of anything that can remove the administrative overhead from the role).

The problem is, when you start going further, you start getting into territory that organizations and individuals have a harder time embracing. Can AI produce schedules, cost estimates, risk registers and resource allocations? Yes, or at least the good tools can. But there aren’t many organizations that will allow the software to do that yet. Partly that’s a trust issue, partly it’s the fact that organizations are still learning how to define the parameters appropriately to allow the tool to produce reliable outputs, and partly it’s because of the quality of the data that is feeding the tools.

In a planning context, AI can develop model portfolios designed to align with the strategic priorities and leverage the available resources (financial and people) as effectively and efficiently as possible. But again, it won’t be trusted to do so yet. It may be trusted to…

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