Embrace AI to Strengthen Your Career

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   Career Development  

I recently took part in a panel discussion that had nothing to do with project management. It was a group of people who run consulting firms, and we were talking about some of the threats and opportunities that the consulting industry faces—and how best to respond.

As you can imagine, artificial intelligence was one of the topics that came up. One of my colleagues on that panel said, “AI isn’t coming to take your job, but a consultant who knows how to use it just might be.”

I think that’s an amazing quote (I wish I had thought of it), and I believe that it is completely relevant to project management as well: AI won’t take your job, but a PM who knows how to use it just might.

AI is certainly an exciting—and disruptive—technology, but it needs people to be able to apply its potential in the best way possible. There are some obvious use cases in project management around the automation of administrative tasks and the contribution to things like estimation, schedule development, risk identification and so on. But beyond that, the success or otherwise of AI is going to come down to the innovative ways that people learn to apply it.

That means that today’s project managers shouldn’t be afraid of the arrival of AI, they should be excited about it. They are the people who are being given the opportunity to …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.