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?
I think the prompt engineering will enhance the PM effectiveness and provide value added performance to his/her work. No prompt engineering can substitute the knowledge or profesional skill of a competent PM when used by a non o poor PM profesional. Saving Changes...
Anonymous
Your concern makes perfect sense. However, despite my extensive experience with AI and its rapid evolution, I firmly believe we are still a long way from AI completely replacing human project managers. While AI excels at automating tasks, analyzing data, and optimizing workflows, project management is much more than just efficiency and numbers. Human project managers bring strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and leadership—qualities that AI, at least in its current and foreseeable form, cannot genuinely replicate Saving Changes...
ARFAOUI SABERProgram Manager| SAIMedjez el bab, 31, Tunisia
Your concern makes perfect sense. However, despite my extensive experience with AI and its rapid evolution, I firmly believe we are still a long way from AI completely replacing human project managers. While AI excels at automating tasks, analyzing data, and optimizing workflows, project management is much more than just efficiency and numbers. Human project managers bring strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and leadership qualities that AI, at least in its current and foreseeable form, cannot genuinely replicate Saving Changes...
Anonymous
The adoption of Prompt Engineering will enhance the effectiveness and productivity of Project Managers in the world we find ourselves today, where there is rapid growth, constant innovations and competition. AI will add more value to Project Managers if used well and ensure good practices. It will reduce the workload and saves time on some tasks we spend hours working on. Saving Changes...
Gabriela BustamanteAdministradora de proyectos| Nuevatel PCS de BoliviaCochabamba, Bolivia (Plurinational State of)
I believe that the adoption of AI in project management will reduce work time in certain aspects, however, a project manager is more than just the preparation of reports, schedules and matrices, because in itself we manage and lead groups of people, where we will have more time to focus our efforts on engaging, inspiring, managing conflicts between people and thus having increasingly better teams... AI can help a lot, but it does not replace soft skills (at least, not yet) Saving Changes...
I don't believe that GenAI will replace the PM role but enable the PM to more complex projects efficiently. This would lead you to believe that these individuals can command a higher salary. The product still needs a human to validate and refine its output. I don't know anyone that has been able to tell me the response was totally what they needed or accurate straight out the gate. As we have seen in the training and in our own experimentation, it isn't always accurate. Every source on the internet doesn't provide quality information and this can lead to big problems. I think those that are afraid of AI are so because they don't understand that it is a tool. These training modules " Prompt Engineering" and "Overview of AI" help get people to that understanding of AI's benefits and limitations as a tool. Saving Changes...
I believe prompt engineering can complement the PM. The importance of blending human inputs with the AI outputs will help ensure accuracy, create greater context, and lessen commoditization of PM skills. In addition, the time savings of using AI could allow PMs to focus on creative aspects, human connections, influencing, etc., which would help build the differentiating/value factors. Saving Changes...
Yau Chang SiewHead of Digital Business and Services | AgrobankKuala Lumpur, Malaysia
May 25, 2024 7:54 PM
Replying to Raman Chadha
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I think any technology that can automate parts of the project management chain can commoditize project management skills once it becomes commonplace. GenAI could be the most powerful such technology that we have seen yet, at least in the recent past. That said, there will always be room to use it as an enabler for managing more complex tasks, e.g., tasks that involve more human to human interaction. We are only scratching the surface of how it can be used and for the foreseeable future, I think it can help differentiate Project Managers if they are open to embracing it and experimenting with it. More than prompt engineering, it will be about being creative in identifying new use cases that GenAI could solve.
With the use of gen AI and agentic AI, it is possible to gradually commoditize "design-make-manage" activities or management of "time-cost-scope". Eg. 1) Design, test, manufacture and pack in dark factories to delivery of gadgets. 2) Develop, iterate, alert breaches, mitigation recommendations in budget management. Where the discipline of project management differentiates would be in value-adding to commoditized activities, in human-to-human, and human-to-machine/software interactions such as providing leadership (managing change and fear), providing context, and directing ethical, secure and compliant use of AI.
In program management AI could commoditize the quantification aspects of benefits realization (eg. cost benefit analysis, resource reallocation recommendations) while enabling differentiation in the qualitative (eg. we would retain this program even though it has negative financial returns because we need to meet our socio-development mandate to support artisanal fishery where the economic benefits are not so easily quantifiable in absolute terms).
Where portfolios are data and research oriented, portfolio management would likely be commoditized by AI. Where portfolio managers differentiate could be at the "visionary" level, in connecting emergent dots (while AI is grounded on historical training data) in technologies or behaviors that AI has no or limited context. Saving Changes...
With the new generation of generative AI portfolio/program/project manager and business analyst role "are dead" at least in the way they were originally defined. I think a good source to understand that are the two courses on generative AI delivered for free by the PMI, mainly if you see the 3 layer model.
Evidently, the roles will be redefined to be the human checks for the AI's knowledge base. Regurgitative learning of AI also means that the need for regulation and validation is now important more than ever. Saving Changes...
Adoption of prompt engineering will keep the Project managers ahead of the curve as evolution of AI capabilities on daily basis and adoption of new technologies to refine and accelerate the various important day to day tasks is the future. By keeping themselves as center of authority and leveraging the Gen AI capabilities, PMs can differentiate themselves and deliver high value. Saving Changes...
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