What activities does AI replace or reduce for project manager? Should we care?

It seems like there are a few prerequisites, and potential roadblocks, to using AI for project management.

1) Complete, accurate, and accessible data. I can't speak for all companies, but those I've worked at and a few others I'm familiar with have more project data in people's heads and unconnected places than they do in central systems. Maybe the data doesn't need to be complete, and I suppose there is some advantage to making bad decisions, due to bad data, faster, as long as you figure it out faster.

2) Budget. A company's willingness to spend the money to clean up the data and connect the systems. Sure, with an integrated AI, you won't need to put all of your data in one central system, but you will need systems that an AI can talk to. This is assuming you can get just one, integrated AI that will talk to all of your systems. Considering how many companies are adding AI to their products, I can see a company having more than one tool that uses AI. Will they be able to talk to each other? Will companies want to spend money on multiple AIs for project managers? Some PMs are lucky if they get Excel, let alone inexpensive PM software.

3) Culture. You will need to get people to start putting complete data into accessible sources. Just yesterday, I read a reddit thread where the PM was asking for ideas on how to get people to adopt PM tools and update task status, because nobody was doing it. Maybe it's getting less frequent, but I can speak from personal experience that it's been this way for over 20 years.

4) Trust. There are still people who don't trust the cloud. How quickly are they going to adopt Skynet? Fear of external AIs accessing internal data, or internal AIs leaking data, are concerns that will need to be addressed, for some.

This is just me guessing, but it seems like there will be advances in project prioritization and selection before we see major changes to our day to day work, across the board for all project managers. There will be companies that spend the time and money to clean up and connect their data, buy the tools PMs need, and build a culture where people update their tasks on a regular basis. And then there will be the rest of us, some of whom will be able to adopt the tools more quickly than others.

Harvard Business Review published an article, in February, titled "How AI Will Transform Project Management". It seemed a little "pie in the sky", but it could become a reality for some of us. My realism pops it's head up when people start spouting about the future perfect world, but at the same time, we need those visions of the future. Maybe we don't achieve the exact vision, but where are we without a vision?

Hi Aarron, I agree with you about the pie in the sky with the HBS article which I read. I'm working an article series on applying AI to PM jobs vs. running AI projects. For example, using AI meeting note taking to generate your action items, issues, generating a summary email, then sending this into a tool like Jira, Asana, etc. etc. This exists today and cuts down 20% of unnecessary meetings and follow-up. Most of the AI discussion centers on making PM tools more efficient and predictive, but that's not where PMs are spending all their time...its in meetings, collaboration, managing escalations, risk mitigation etc.

I'm super interested in your thoughts on providing tips that are very practical so PMs can ditch their admin work and focus on what's important and strategic...not getting replace by a robot given the Gartner hype