How To Manage Using Artificial Intelligence

 

I’ve been thinking about a webinar I’m putting together and Artificial Intelligence is on the topic list to discuss during that session.

It’s a trend that project managers and business leaders can’t afford to ignore, but it’s not yet clear to me how it will help businesses do anything particular. In other words: it’s a good theory and I can definitely see the applications, but how do I use it?

In doing some research for that webinar I’ve been digging in to AI in more detail and clarifying my thoughts.

Here’s where I am up to.

Forbes shares survey results from Narrative Science that show that by 2018, more than 60% of all companies are anticipated to use a form of AI programming to manage some aspect of their business. They also cite a study from Forrester that says despite this growth, around 40% of companies currently have no plan for how smart technology can help manage their business.

So we know it has the potential to be great, we just don’t know how to harness it.

Understanding A.I.

Smart software consists of customized algorithms designed to scan large amounts of data very quickly, displaying the output in an easy-to-understand, elegantly designed presentation. The tools don’t actually do any “thinking”; they just look like they do.

You will likely need to do some work to set the any AI programme with your existing infrastructure. But, once you do, you can reduce a formerly mundane and repetitive task to the click of a button! At least, that’s the theory.

Where are the applications, then?

Reliable Recruitment

The internet has become a double-edged sword when it comes to hiring for your team. On the one hand, the rapid communication and social media sites allow leaders to be instantly linked with highly skilled workers from all over the world, with full access to their work history, résumé, and portfolio. On the other hand, there are simply too many sites and too many candidates to possibly review them all.

Project managers and team leaders have better things to do than sift through CVs and this is where AI can help.

Organizations have begun using AI software to scan through the millions of online CVs, across dozens of social media sites, to find the skills and experience that they are looking for, leaving you more time to actually sit down and interview only the most suitable candidates.

Customer Service

You may have noticed that more and more websites now offer round the clock support on their websites. Many don’t even have any waiting time when you open a chat. Intercom does this, and there are Facebook bots that run through Messenger doing a similar job if you engage with a page, sign up to an event or similar.

 And yet...the advice you receive sounds too human to be a pre-programmed response.

Those pre-programme responses aren’t a human waiting in the wings. Chatbots are AI programmes designed to take the pressure off your customer service teams. As a replacement for first-line support, chatbots analyse a customer’s message for key words, scan a database of predefined answers, and then customise a response so lifelike that most humans can’t even tell the difference.

I think that will change in time though, as customers get used to dealing with bots and can pick them out.

Finance Management

Making sense of your project financial data is another area where AI can help. Whether it is scanning projects in the portfolio to better manage investment across the business and capitalise on projects with the most attractive profit projections, or isolating key products and departments where money is being lost, AI can help keep your leadership team ahead of the curve.

This is definitely an area where portfolio management teams should be looking out for advances. We have so much financial information trapped in our project management tools that it’s ripe for processing in an AI way.

I’m sure many project management tools will catch up but for now I’ve seen this done mainly in financial management packages, the kind your Finance team would be using. For example, Sage’s chatbot, Pegg, monitors all your accounts, your income and your expenditure, and provides real-time data as though you were texting your accountant...only Pegg responds faster.

This could be great for small project management firms like design agencies, but even bigger companies using products like this could benefit from not having to dig into the Help files every time they wanted some info. Or maybe project managers could be given access to view some of the financials relating to their projects? It would be a huge help to me when dealing with suppliers if I could use a chatbot to find out if an invoice had been paid.

So, whether you’re already using Facebook’s “Insights” to track who is interacting with your PM training page, or if your heavy machinery could benefit from a programme which tracks sensory data and automatically orders replacement parts when they are needed, AI is the means for taking all that data you’ve been collecting about your company and finally making sense of it.

Do you already use AI in your business? On your projects somehow? Let us know in the comments. You never know, you could end up as a case study in my next webinar!