Three Reasons Why AI Has Better Soft Skills than Project Managers

 

I commonly see people express their personal belief that AI can never replace project managers because humans have better soft skills. This is an opinion, and I am not aware of any research that supports this assumption. In fact, I see evidence to the contrary. 

1. Incompetent project managers 

A survey in 2019 showed that 64 percent of employees would rather work for a robot than their current manager. That reflects my own work experience, as half of the managers I worked for were ineffective at managing a team. They had their own agenda, took credit for the excellent work of others, berated employees, and were terrible communicators. People have an idealistic view of how humans are all great managers when the reality is somewhat different. AI can be a great coach, delivering a fair and unbiased performance evaluation. AI can communicate positive and negative news without being judgmental.

1. Human bias

Based on the research of Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, humans are burdened by personal bias. In other words, we have baggage that influences our actions and behaviors.  AI has far less baggage, and the only bias comes from the data selected by humans to feed the AI algorithms. AI bias can be identified and removed. Is it as easy or possible to do with humans?

2. Empathy

This is the most significant factor and least understood. When a human communicates with another human, it is based on the sender’s perspective.  The bias or baggage of the sender influences the message. Communication created by the sender is based on their personality, background, and emotions of the moment. AI reverses this flawed process. An AI algorithm evaluates the recipient first. What is the recipient’s personality, background, and feelings? AI creates a message based on how best to communicate with the recipient.  That is a powerful soft skill.

There are amazing project managers who have excellent soft skills. However, people struggle to understand each other and to communicate effectively. Evidence of this is the large volume of training courses on this subject. Properly programmed AI software provides better analysis and more effective transactions with team members. The ideal solution is for project managers to collaborate with and learn from AI tools. Working with AI offers the best outcome, where project managers rapidly learn and implement the soft skills needed to manage projects.