Jacob K. N.Project Management ConsultantDallas, GA, United States
Will AI Replace Project Managers in 2025?
A lot of professionals across various fields are concerned whether AI will lead to massive job losses in the next three years. Elon Musk has consistently warned against untamed development of AI, and predicted that AI will be smarter than humans by the end of next year.
Will AI be a substitute for project managers or will project managers use AI as a PM tool? Or, will AI automate parts of project management working alongside project managers?
In the Feb 2023 Harvard Business Review issue, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez and Ricardo Viana Vargas argued that only 35% of projects today are completed successfully. But by 2030, AI will revolutionize project prioritization, monitoring and evaluation leaving project managers with the role of coaching and stakeholder management.
I agree with the position of Antonio and Ricardo except that I think this will happen much sooner than 2030, and coaching will also be done by AI. In the light of AI, me-think that project managers main duty will be managing stakeholders in the foreseeable future.
What do you think? Will AI Replace Project Managers in 2025?
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Kevin OtimProject/ Construction Manager | Nitsch Engineering (U) LimitedKampala,, Uganda
Highly Unlikely, Project managers play a vital role in communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, and motivating teams. These require emotional intelligence, a uniquely human capability that AI currently struggles with. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
AI is a broarder term. We are using AI from more than 40 years ago. The "new kid on the block" is the new generative AI model which is the genesis of foundational models like ChatGPT. I think the answer to your question is inside the free of cost courses delivered by the PMI and mainly inside the 3 layer model. In my opinion, business analyst/program/project/portfolio manager roles "are dead" at least in the way they were orginally defined. Saving Changes...
I find 1 to 6 years a very unrealistic timeline. At old large companies, just migrating to Office 365 alone is a multi-year project. Getting the necessary business systems to exchange data in a way that enables greater capabilities is 5+ and can be billions of dollars.
I find it equivalent to asking whether electric vehicles will replace gasoline powered in that time frame. There will be motion in that direction, but the scale of the change across giant systems of systems is just too great. The effort required is probably comparable to the scale of the 1960's space race. Saving Changes...
Candice ShubbieConsultant| PROJECT40 ConsultingOntario, Ca, United States
Jacob,
I don't believe that PMs will be replaced that quickly, based on my experience with both large and small organizations. Larger orgs seem to be struggling with their strategy for using AI tools to streamline processes, while smaller orgs are still trying to move away from managing everything in Excel.
I do believe that Stakeholder management will become more important as AI tools get better at managing projects.
While I don't believe PMs will be completely replaced by AI within 5 years, I do believe that PMs who understand AI will be replaced by PMs who don't. Saving Changes...
