Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Robot Readiness
| Are you ready for robotic coworkers? Is your organization ready for a partly automated workforce? If these questions are coming up where you work, you don’t want to miss the July PM Network® article “Bots Onboard.” Implementing robots on staff requires readjustments. It is a trial-and-error affair, so most organizations are starting small. One example is Millennium Hotels and Resorts in Singapore. The organization piloted a hospitality robot at one of its hotels to deliver guest-requested amenities to their rooms. The testing phase showed how the robotic coworker can make staff jobs easier. NASA invited four robots to join its shared services center team to automate certain financial processing activities. The project team faced a challenge right away with the bots: how are they to be credentialed to work with sensitive material? The decision: Robots get an agency user ID and government email account and gain system access just like any new user. The robots had to be trained to do their tasks and then user testing ensured that the appropriate information was captured to track lessons learned. The article quotes shared services center enterprise service division chief Pamela J. Wolfe as saying her unit is mining ideas from NASA employees on other uses for automation. “If we think it’s right…we look at the requirement, what priority it has and what benefit it yields." Appropriately enough, Ms. Wolfe concludes “The sky is the limit.” What has been your introductory experiences with robotics and automation in the workplace? |
Our IT Columnist Looks Into Her Crystal Ball
| The future will be here before you know it. It’s best to be prepared. Priya Patra, PMP, IT columnist for PM Network and a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com, has you covered. Her latest column looks at what project managers can expect their role to look like in the year 2033, just 15 years away. If you think that digital disruption will change that role—you are right. Priya covers three areas in her gaze into the crystal: automation, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Automation, she says, will take tedious drudgery of documentation out of project managers’ lives and allow them to focus on more creative tasks. Bots will collect and distribute information and will actually join teams, alongside humans, that project professionals will manage. AI will take things a step forward and attune project managers to the social and emotional well-being of their teams. This will mean project managers’ people skills will be even more essential. Priya doesn’t want you to be frightened of the future, but rather celebrate it. The world will still need project managers, even if their role appears different than today. And that is true no matter where technology is taking us to—and how fast it is getting there. |