George FreemanThought Leader | Author | Architect| Florida, United States
I recently conducted a poll on this platform asking the following question, similar to one that I posed in a past thread:
Question: When you ponder the impact of AI-based tooling and the future of AI-enabled technologies on your personal and professional life, which word resonates most with your being?
These break down from a positive/negative viewpoint as follows:
[A] Positive (93-78%)
[B] Negative (10-8%)
[C] Either Way (16-13%) - Disruptor
What does this represent to you? How would you characterize the mindsets behind, let’s say the top five—And NO, I was not the one who voted for “Apparition.”
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Any leadership team which would summarily eliminate PM roles in favor of AI tools is likely not operating at a high level of organizational delivery maturity and deserves the trouble they land themselves in.
Qualified, competent PM talent is usually in high demand so I'd expect folks impacted in this manner would likely find a better employer to move to.
Kiron Saving Changes...
George FreemanThought Leader | Author | Architect| Florida, United States
The questions of concern I’m bringing forward are about a feasible trajectory that, if realized, could impact our profession. I believe these impacts would have nothing to do with an organization’s delivery maturity.
I’m not talking about the wholesale elimination of project professionals from any given organization; instead, I’m talking about a substantial reduction in project professionals based on future AI-based feature/function offerings from the PM software industry.
In other words, the AI-based PM tooling of the future will be marketed as transformative in its ability to triple or quadruple the “bandwidth” of a project professional, reducing the need to add additional personnel to take on more projects or conversely provide an opportunity to have a “reduction in force” of project personnel.
I’m just presenting a cautionary tale that I hope is wrong. Saving Changes...
I'm very confident that some managers and executives will assume AI is a panacea and over-rotate in using it to replace actual people. I have seen that many times with various types of digital transformation efforts.
Unrealistic expectations eventually meet reality which often results in failures, some at very large scales. For example, at some point the plans and instructions created by AI reach human hands and at the skilled laborer level in this day and age, people are more effective working with other people than handed a bunch of detailed instructions. The culture revolts actively or passively against the machine. After all, the term sabotage comes from workers throwing their wooden shoes (sabot) into the mechanisms of machinery during labor disputes in the industrial revolution. In the project world, that may translate to following the AI generated instructions verbatim even though it is clear they won't work (malicious compliance).
As the experiment with taking more and more people out of the equation starts to backfire, a balance must be found between an "ideal state" and reality or else a business will eventually fail. That may change in the long term, although it requires a cultural change which is typically more of a generational shift than a 5 year business plan. Saving Changes...
Raman ChadhaManager| DeloitteMillbrae, United States
1) Significant optimism in the power of AI
2) I am nervous that the audience may over-expect and / or over-rely on AI, with it being labeled as an enabler / adviser
3) Related to #2 above, it reinforces my belief that the user needs to have some basic level of scientific knowledge of whichever type of AI they are planning on using Saving Changes...
