Will the widespread adoption of prompt engineering commoditize project management skills, or can it help PMs differentiate themselves and command higher value?
Director, Learning Design & Development| PMIAsheville, NC, United States
Hi PMI Community! I’m Sarah Philbrick, and I work as a Product Manager at PMI with a focus on our learning offerings. As we go on this skill-building journey together, I’m excited to engage in meaningful conversations, explore trending topics, and learn from each other.
Reflecting on one such topic, GenAI and prompt engineering, I am interested to hear your perspective on commoditization vs. differentiation.
Will the widespread adoption of prompt engineering commoditize project management skills, or can it help PMs differentiate themselves and command higher value?
Project managers must use prompts to control projects and take advantage of the benefits that artificial intelligence offers for the development of our activities.
I believe that the usage of Gen AI will not replaced the work of a Project Managers but will help us during daily work. But I prefer using it when I really have utility of use it, because it is important now to continue to use our brain to reduce electric consumption of each Gen AI activity. Saving Changes...
Thangavelu SundararajanPrincipal Architect| Cognizant Technology SolutionsMelbourne, Victoria, Australia
To keep ourselves with the evolution of AI, we need to adopt it and make the best use of it.
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Anonymous
Generative AI automates PM admin work, but increases the value of experienced leaders who provide judgment, risk management, stakeholder trust, and accountability for outcomes.
I have been using a few gen AI tools, specifically chatbots, data analytics tools to simplify my work in day-to-day PM role. They work great for prompts like summarization, comparison and some level of data mining, but there are many use case scenarios where one can't totally rely on the AI tool to get the final solution. For e.g. I tried mining a spreadsheet and convert certain texts into shorter characters required to visually represent my data into a line/bar chart. While the chatbot wasn't able to give me the final graph, it saved me several minutes in getting an excel formula with examples, that I was able to use to convert the big spreadsheet into more sensical data table, and moreover it gave me steps to quickly create the line chart that I eventually wanted. All that within 10min.
So, I see potential in increasing productivity!
Good example. I thinks we should all be a little more cerative in testing - and expanding - the boundaries and posiibilities of AI. Thanks for sharing the example.
I am not sure that AI will replace anything we do except the mundane work that takes time away from us to be able to make better decisions and plans. Personally, I love using AI for analysis and learning.
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Anil RahejaProject Manager| Tadweer GroupAbu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Prompt Engineering is and can be another tool in PMs toolkit, it depends on how skilled are we at the use of these tools that will differentiate us. Saving Changes...
Madalyn LindseySenior Project Manager| Lenovo, LtdDurham, Nc, United States
Prompt engineering won’t commoditize project management; it will raise the baseline while widening the gap for PMs who pair AI fluency with judgment, stakeholder orchestration, and domain context. The differentiation comes from how you run the human+AI system: treat AI like a program you manage, build a lightweight prompt library for core PM tasks (status, minutes, risks), ground prompts in the right domain data, and enforce quality gates (facts, bias checks, traceability) so outputs are trustworthy. Integrate Copilot-style capabilities into your cadence—prep/recap for meetings, decision logs, RASCI updates—and make governance explicit so stakeholders can rely on the results. Most importantly, lead the change: teach teams how to ask, what to verify, and when to escalate to humans. In this model, templates and prompt patterns are accelerators, but your differentiation is the discernment behind them—framing problems, embedding constraints, and translating ambiguity into repeatable workflows that cut cycle time and improve signal over noise. PMs who do this will command higher value for outcomes, not just deliverables. Saving Changes...
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