Will the widespread adoption of prompt engineering commoditize project management skills, or can it help PMs differentiate themselves and command higher value?

Hi PMI Community — thanks Sarah for raising this.

I’m Cel Medes Dijamco, PMO & Operations Director at Alxemy. After 8 months of using GenAI in our PMO and Operations work, here’s what we’ve seen:

• Helped increase our team’s delivery throughput by ~5x within 8 months
• Reduced time to out by ~80%, creating real cost savings for customers.
• End-user test case collation dropped from ~3 hours to 2–3 minutes, with analysis done in ~30 minutes. PMs still validate and decide, but the manual grind is gone.

Sarah, regarding your question on commoditization vs differentiation:

For me, GenAI commoditizes tasks, not project management. The admin-heavy parts become baseline, but PM value still comes from analysis during the conversations, judgement, context, stakeholder leadership, and problem framing.

PMs who embrace GenAI won’t be replaced, they’ll deliver faster, think bigger, and lead better.

Keen to hear others: what GenAI use case has most improved your delivery?

This is good food for thought. Even with AI involved, the project management community consists of individual professionals who work together to help projects be successful. To replace these individuals with AI solutions puts the foundation at risk. How would AI be accountable and responsible?

While prompt engineering will streamline many operational tasks, it won’t commoditize core project management skills. Strong PMs differentiate themselves through judgment, stakeholder alignment, risk management, and the ability to drive clarity in ambiguous situations—areas where AI can support but not replace human leadership.

In fact, PMs who learn to pair these strengths with effective prompt engineering will deliver faster insights, clearer communication, and better decision-making, ultimately increasing their value rather than reducing it.

Gen AI or Agentic AI is there to augment the human capabilities. The widespread adoption with ethics and human in the loop approach will surely improve the accuracy, reliability and explainability of the outcomes. Those who can exploit this facility for the benefit of overall project governance, it will surely create unique benefits and achieve the overall increase in productivity.

Gen AI or Agentic AI is there to augment the human capabilities. The widespread adoption with ethics and human in the loop approach will surely improve the accuracy, reliability and explainability of the outcomes. Those who can exploit this facility for the benefit of overall project governance, it will surely create unique benefits and achieve the overall increase in productivity.

I agree, Gen AI is a tool, not a replacement.

I feel, the "adoption of prompt engineering will help Project Manager to stand different rather than making them commoditize. With the right Gen AI tool, we ease our Mundane task and concentrate on more productive and innovative task. Gen AI cannot be a replacement for a Leader, only a replaces for a task master.